F E A T U R E S    Issue 2.06 - June 1996

R-Tech

By Peter Schwartz



Long before most people got it, Albert Bressand, a French futurist and economist, saw how information technologies were transforming the world. In 1985, Bressand and longtime colleague Catherine Distler set up the French think tank Prométhée and began studying the deregulation of telecommunications and global finance, the economic integration of the world and new ways to run a corporation. Last year, they came out with the book La planète relationnelle, which has yet to be published in English. Peter Schwartz talked to them in their Paris office.

wired: How would you title your book La planète relationnelle in English ?

albert bressand: You might say something like "the linking machine", or "the relationship machine". It's really about how the new machines of today are between man and man, rather than between man and nature. And relations rather than material products are what is processed in these machines. You might also call the book: The R-tech World.

I like that title as contrasted to high-tech or info-tech.

ab: Information technology was a good name 20 years ago when computing and handling data were the end of the story. But now, the reason we deploy so-called information technology increasingly has to do with managing relationships. As in those among people, like on the Internet; or among companies, like on an electronic data interchange network; or among nations, like when central banks use clearing and settlement networks. Most of what is called information technology today has already outgrown the name and is now relationship technology.

How does the impact of R-tech measure up to other technology transformations in history ?

ab: Look at the previous revolution, the one that started around 1840 when the train and the telegraph first created a high-tech sector in American society. Companies in that sector needed to be organised differently to manage in terms of minutes rather than days. Suddenly, you could know prices in faraway markets and ship goods in a truly integrated American market. And it was only at that point that the mainstream production companies and industries reorganised to take advantage of what was fast becoming mass consumption. Last but not least, the whole system coalesced around the new model of the company - the enormous industrial company. This linear description can be applied to the changes triggered by relationship technology since the early 1980s. We have been through the high-tech phase; we are now in the middle of the distribution phase. We're still looking at the impact of electronic distribution on traditional retail networks. And in one or two decades what will be at stake is a new concept of the corporation - things that are described in negative terms today, like downsizing or out-sourcing or concentrating on core competencies, may find their place in a new, vibrant model.

What can we learn from this analogy ?

ab: We once had two mega-machines, the train and the telegraph. Individually, each one would not have been enough to change America. If you only had the train, it would have been just a faster pony express. If you only had the telegraph, it would have given people the ability to interact with others far away but without drawing any concrete consequence from it. Whereas the telegraph and train combined produced a new concept of distribution, produced a new type of financial market: the futures market. Farmers could enter into contracts about future delivery. Because of the train, buyers could be certain that the grain would reach them. Because of the telegraph, there was enough certainty about the shipment to trust the contract.

What are the two mega-machines of today ?

catherine distler: One is the Internet, in the metaphoric sense of all electronic networks. Not just the Internet itself, but the fact that all electronic networks are interconnecting and allow communication through voice, text and image all over the world.

ab: But having just that would be like having only the telegraph. There would be little impact on the real world beyond entering into relationships with people on the other side of the world.

What's the second ?

ab: The bar code. Again, think of it as a metaphor: all the unique electronic identifications of products, people, money and knowledge that allow these things to circulate through networks.

cd: It's the train analogy. Thanks to the bar code, the new couriers of the new distribution system developing today are able to tell you where your parcel is and when it will reach you. They know exactly where - in which plane, over which town.

How will these two new mega-machines play out ?

ab: The true revolution will only happen if we end up with different communities than the ones we started with. This is where planetary or global communities are really becoming thinkable.

In Europe, we have seen that trade is only one of five or six types of interactions needed for real integration to develop. At the international level, we also can move from widening to deepening. Widening is bringing as many countries as possible into the market economy - by and large this is done. Deepening is building on these trade interactions and developing other sorts of interaction - making it more than an economic community, making it a human community.

If this technology is used for creating human communities, the 21st century will be very different and we will have done the equivalent of what was done in the half-century between 1840 and 1900. If not, we simply will have used the new tools to rehearse the same acts, and we will not have moved closer to one world. We will not have gone deeper into making war unthinkable, making barriers among people unthinkable.

The opportunity is there. The time has come to shift from the engineering approach of information technology, which was totally warranted at the beginning, to the human and relationship approach. This is what we call La planète relationnelle.

Peter Schwartz (schwartz@gbn.org) is the chairman of Global Business Network, a futurist think tank in California.