Interaction and Impedance

In the early 1990s, I was on a research and development project called the Enterprise Computing Project, within an area that was then known as Open Distributed Processing (ODP) and subsequently evolved into Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). One of the concepts we introduced was that of Interaction Distance. This was explained in a couple of papers that Ian Macdonald and I wrote in 1994-5, and mentioned briefly in my 2001 book.

Interaction distance is not measured primarily in terms of physical distance, but in terms of such dimensions as cost, risk, speed and convenience. It is related to notions of commodity and availability.

Goods that are available to us enrich our lives and, if they are technologically available, they do so without imposing burdens on us. Something is available in this sense if it has been rendered instantaneous, ubiquitous, safe, and easy. Borgmann p 41

In our time, things are not even regarded as objects, because their only important quality has become their readiness for use. Today all things are being swept together into a vast network in which their only meaning lies in their being available to serve some end that will itself also be directed towards getting everything under control. Levitt

One of the key principles of ODP was distribution transparency - you can consume a service without knowing where anything is located. The service interface provides convenient access to something that might be physically located anywhere. Or even something that doesn't have a fixed existence, but is assembled dynamically from multiple sources to satisfy your request.

As we noted at the time, this affects the relational economy in several ways. It may introduce new intermediary roles into the ecosystem, or alternatively it may allow some previously dominant intermediaries to be bypassed. Meanwhile, new value-adding services may become viable. Over the past twenty years there have been various standardization initiatives of this kind, often prefixed by the word Open. For example, Open Banking.

The example we used in our 1995 paper was video on demand (VoD). At that time there were three main methods for watching films: cinema, scheduled television or cable broadcast, and video rental. Video rental generally involved borrowing (and then rewinding and returning) VHS cassettes. DVDs were not introduced until 1996, and Netflix was founded in 1997.

Our analysis of VoD identified a delivery subsystem and a control subsystem, and sketched how these roles might be taken by some kind of collaboration between existing players (cable companies, phone companies). We also noted the organizational and commercial difficulties of implementing such a collaboration. As we now know, in the VoD case these difficulties were bypassed by the emergence of streaming services that were able to combine control and delivery into a single platform, and the technical configuration we outlined now looks horribly complicated, but the organizational and commercial issues are still relevant for other potential collaborative innovations.

And our analysis of interaction distance in relation to this example is still valid. In particular, we showed how VoD (in whatever technological form this might take) could significantly reduce the interaction distance between the film distributor and the consumer.

People often talk about digital transformation, and want to use this label for all kinds of random innovations. As I see it, the digital transformation in the video industry was largely on the production side. While the switch from VHS to DVD brought some minor benefits for the consumer, the real difference for the consumer came from the switch from rental to streaming, reducing interaction distance and bringing availability closer in space and time to the consumer. So I think a more meaningful label for this kind of innovation is service transformation.

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Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (University of Chicago Press, 1984)

William Levitt's introduction to Heiddegger, The Question Concerning Technology

Christian Licoppe, ‘Connected’ Presence: The Emergence of a New Repertoire for Managing Social Relationships in a Changing Communication Technoscape (Environment and Planning D Society and Space, February 2004)

Ian G Macdonald and Richard Veryard, Modelling Business Relationships in a Non-Centralised Systems Environment. In A. Sölvberg et al. (eds.) Information Systems Development for Decentralized Organizations (Springer 1995)

Richard Veryard, Information Coordination (Prentice-Hall 1994) 

Richard Veryard, The Future of Distributed Services (December 2000)

Richard Veryard, Component-Based Business: Plug and Play (Springer 2001)

Richard Veryard and Ian G. Macdonald, EMM/ODP: A Methodology for Federated and Distributed Systems, in Verrijn-Stuart, A.A., and Olle, T.W. (eds) Methods and Associated Tools for the Information Systems Life Cycle (IFIP Transactions North-Holland 1994)

Wikipedia: ODP Reference Model