How Peer-to-Peer Is Going to Disrupt CPE

Having said all that stuff in my last post about the positive disruption of a certain innovative webcast delivery model, looking even further down the road reveals that my model isn't disruptive enough (although it's a nice start for any organization wanting to reduce its dependency on third parties).

In 1993, if you wanted instant access to Counting Crows' hit, Mr. Jones, you had to buy the August and Everything CD and deal with the other ten songs on it. The vinyl turntable had yet to experience its retro revival, and CD singles just weren't catching on.

In other words, at that time, consumer and technological forces dictated that the multi-track CD was the only practical way to package an individual rock song. More accurately stated, it was the most efficient way to monetize the experience of listening to pop music, much to the benefit of record companies, those large organizations that were needed to aggregate the talent and to acquire and run the expensive machinery and processes required to churn out those discs.

In the same way, taxi companies were once necessary to organize fleets of cars and drivers, and handicrafts required brick and mortar boutique shops to reach customers. However, technologies that foster peer-to-peer connectivity are disrupting one industry after another and are rewiring, well, pretty much everything.

Over three million people subscribe to the Shaytards' extensive collection of self-produced vlogs on YouTube. My daughter spends more time with that family, than I, at her age, spent watching anything requiring an extensive broadcast network to serve up (a trend, by the way, that calls into question the ROI of a content provider spending a large amount of resources  on enhancing "production value").

Etsy, Uber, and Airbnb, are not a store, a taxi company, or a hotel, respectively. They are nothing more than platforms that bring people with needs into direct contact with people providing products or services, something to which the CPE world has been relatively immune.

From continuing education's infancy through to about five years ago, the most efficient way to package knowledge had been "the course", the CD of the learning industry, and one of the innovations behind the cpecoalition.org model is the transformation of "the course". Customers can register for the entire service as a whole and, when they want a synchronous webcast credit or two (or 8), drop-in whenever a webcast is scheduled, without the need to register for individual courses.

But this reduces only one level of abstraction. The entire industry is focused on "the course", but the "the course" is a construct that enables the delivery of "the credit hour" (the thing, by the way, that the customer is actually paying for), which itself is merely a measure of a more fundamental concept: "acquisition of a competency", and, as an increasing number of people are now admitting, albeit often in hushed tones, it is not a particularly accurate measure.

It is already technologically possible for one peer who possesses a particular accounting competency to bestow that competency onto another peer. Of course, a century ago, a telephone call could do the trick, but a mere phone conversation presents tracking issues that P2P platforms are now sophisticated enough to crack.

Most of the players in the game today are focused on delivery of the content itself (video, audio, slides and certificates), in a way that conforms to the following model:

Second place in this race will go to the developer of a system that can (1) distill a hierarchical taxonomy of competencies that the accounting profession can agree on derived from financial industry and consumer needs and (2) demonstrate which of those competencies reside in which peers. Granted, this is a much taller order than Uber telling me where the driver I need is located. In a future post, I will discuss how BitCoin and similar distributed networks provide a model for internally and organically solving this challenge without the need to run all the input through a regulatory agency (think of "credits" as a form of cryptocurrency). 

(In the figure below, categories of competency are color coded and the relative sizes of the nodes in the network reflect levels of "authority" in that competency.)

The grand prize, however, will be awarded to the system developer that can convince NASBA, in its current form, it is no longer needed. Again, no small feat, and a struggle that will actually improve the final product.

Even though it recently allowed financial transactions to use BitCoin, California is currently seeking to regulate digital currencies in such a way, argue BitCoin proponents, that will severely limit their effectiveness. P2P transportation providers are winning an ongoing legal fight to be regarded by Uber as employees, instead of contractors (which may result in Uber needing to rewrite its entire business plan), and the hospitality industry is pressuring state and local governments to place tighter controls on Airbnb and similar platforms.

Some may bitterly complain that these are artificial, bureaucratic roadblocks designed merely to protect established industries, but I think some P2P assumptions, such as Uber driver employment status, the safety of Airbnb customers, and whatever a P2P-driven CPE world ends up looking like, do require scrutiny, and the services will be better for the effort.