Can Social Software Make IT More Dynamic?

Software AG deputy CTO Miko Matsumura believes the power of people

By David Worthington

February 20, 2008 —

Aligning IT and business practices has become the Holy Grail of the software industry, and enterprises are demanding more dynamic solutions from software makers. Today’s enterprise is constituted of people, processes and technologies, and business infrastructure is increasingly bound by human behavior.

SD Times interviewed Miko Matsumura, deputy CTO of Software AG, to learn more about how social networking, the concept behind Facebook and LinkedIn, makes IT more dynamic by empowering people and coordinating their activities.

SD Times: Why is social software emerging in the enterprise?

Miko Matsumura: From our perspective, we view social software as part of a broader story. The emergence of social software is something that is fairly deep. It seems to be the segmentation of enterprise software into three regions. I want to be concise with this, because it’s not the traditional segmentation of hardware, middleware and applications.

The three layers are the machine layer, the corporate layer and the human layer. The bottom layer of enterprise software has to do with machines. This includes mainframes, transactional systems and the data center.

The middle layer has to do with the needs of companies. This layer includes both enterprise applications like supply chain, CRM, ERP, but also traditional middleware like integration, SOA, ESB, etc.

The emerging layer in this new way to look at software is the human layer. This includes what people traditionally call “front office” applications like productivity and collaboration apps. But what is transforming this layer is the emergence of the social graph and new interfaces.

The things that my kids do on the Internet are also ways to propagate events, collaboration and to coordinate IT infrastructure and the deployment of new processes and services.

SD Times: How are these layers interrelated?

MM: These three layers correspond with the three major architectural patterns in software today: the service-oriented pattern where everything is a reusable component, the process-oriented pattern where everything is a process, and the event-oriented pattern where everything is an event.

In the world of the data center, looking at everything as a service makes a lot of sense. As you move up to the corporate layer, process is the dominant metaphor. At the human layer, events are the primary model.

Software AG sees this as an opportunity, because we view these three layers as having a coordination problem. How do you integrate the machine, the human and the company? Each of these three entities has a unique set of limitations, strengths, capabilities and requirements.

SD Times: What happens in the human layer?

MM: In the human layer, companies are competing and differentiating. What our customers are realizing is that both their own employees as well as their customers are humans, and that humans make the key decisions that drive things like brand, like customer experience and customer relationship.

Even in a B2B scenario, we have a much more event- and exception-driven way of managing our customer relationships. In this way, companies differentiate themselves and provide superior customer service.

SD Times: What is Software AG doing to create social software?

MM: We work on internal projects and deploy those capabilities at more advanced customer sites. We have advanced R&D efforts that embed social networking concepts into our software capabilities. A large telecom vendor is putting social software on top of CentraSite [a governance product sold by Software AG].

We will begin to expose some of the capabilities and a few advancements in products in this type of category in mid-2008. We have a lot of demand for this type of capability. This is why we see our customers moving towards a focus on interaction management both on the service provider side as well as on the customer side.

SD Times: How do you encapsulate all of those concepts into an application?

MM: A lot of it [social-enabled applications] ends up looking like existing tools, but it’s glued together into a much more best of breed solution for you to succeed and communicate. Alerts, notifications, and approvals can be expressed in whatever system that you need: instant messengers, pagers, RSS feeds, etc.

SD Times: You mentioned coordination. How does that fit in to the mix?

MM: Ultimately an enterprise of any size is made up of heterogeneous concerns: lots of groups of people with differing interests and agendas. Coordinating this to meet the needs of customers requires an understanding of the human layer: one of coordination, collaboration, events, but also a relationship to policies and processes.

This relationship is one of federation, where smaller groups need to give up a degree of autonomy in order to participate in the larger enterprise.

Social technologies can go deeper than collaboration and move into coordination. The coordination concept is a little bit postmodern; it transcends a universal interface. We are hoping that the coordination function can be [supplied by] the federation of tools that people use.

SD Times: What are some real-world use cases?

MM: It’s not hard to make the machine layer and corporate layer get along. Machines have certain measurable capabilities and you just have to make a capacity plan. This is pretty normal. You can measure a machine and understand exactly what it will do next.

There is a very substantial boundary between the corporate layer and the human layer. How do you predict what humans will do next? Why is this an important thing to do?

Well, take a look at successful products like the Nintendo Wii. Nobody predicted the huge demand that would be created by such a product. This impacted production and delivery in manufacturing [parts] and supply [to consumers] hugely. You could claim that this product was an anomaly, but with the scale of the Internet, increasingly people will participate in “Flash Commerce,” where certain products will become very hot.

The boundary, we feel, is the most challenging in IT deployment is boundary between business and IT function. The tension is between the needs of the corporation and the limitations of the machine layer and the needs of the business users. If you watch this dynamic you realize that the business user needs are just reflecting the needs of their customers. It’s a very human dynamic.

So, getting the business to recognize policies, limitations and constraints while innovating and making money is a big challenge.

Share this link: http://www.sdtimes.com/link/31746

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