Dematerialisation of OSS

In 1972, the Club of Rome in its report The Limits to Growth predicted a steadily increasing demand for material as both economies and populations grew. The report predicted that continually increasing resource demand would eventually lead to an abrupt economic collapse. Studies on material use and economic growth show instead that society is gaining the same economic growth with much less physical material required. Between 1977 and 2001, the amount of material required to meet all needs of Americans fell from 1.18 trillion pounds to 1.08 trillion pounds, even though the country’s population increased by 55 million people. Al Gore similarly noted in 1999 that since 1949, while the economy tripled, the weight of goods produced did not change.
Wikipedia on the topic of Dematerialisation.

The weight of OSS transaction volumes appears to be increasing year on year as we add more stuff to our OSS. The touchpoint explosion is amplifying this further. Luckily, our platforms / middleware, compute, networks and storage have all been scaling as well so the increased weight has not been as noticeable as it might have been (even though we’ve all worked on OSS that have been buckling under the weight of transaction volumes right?).

Does it also make sense that when there is an incremental cost per transaction (eg via the increasingly prevalent cloud or “as a service” offerings) that we pay closer attention to transaction volumes because there is a great perception of cost to us? But not for “internal” transactions where there is little perceived incremental cost?

But it’s not so much the transaction processing volumes that are the problem directly. It’s more by implication. For each additional transaction there’s the risk of a hand-off being missed or mis-mapped or slowing down overall activity processing times. For each additional transaction type, there’s additional mapping, testing and regression testing effort as well as an increased risk of things going wrong.

Do you measure transaction flow volumes across your entire OSS suite? Does it provide an indication of where efficiency optimisation (ie dematerialisation) could occur and guide your re-factoring investments? Does it guide you on process optimisation efforts?

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