Reading the blog entry that Hugh did in the last couple of days in response to the questions from Shel Israel who is currently doing some unspecified work for SAP, the question came up about how ERP and Social Media will start to interact.
I was thinking about this last night, and had some quite specific thoughts about this, but also a larger subject that I have been thinking about on and off for the last few years. The idea is that of the Singularity, a point at which technological progress comes on so fast that humanity just kind of disappears over an event horizon, whistling happily to their AI friends as they do so. As Ken MacLeod describes the Singularity it a kind of “Rapture for nerds”. Essentially, nothing can remain the same, and we all go off into some kind of higher existence techno-utopia, depending on which version you subscribe to.
So what has this to do with social media, you ask confused? Well for me, it is the point that what we humans are good at, and what computers are good at, are diametrically opposed, and somewhat contradictory, and that this will prevent the computer world, ERP, and the human network on the computer, Social Media ever really being that closely interlinked, in a functional sense. I do see very clearly that social media is a good place to talk about ERP, look at the SAP Developers Network for a start, but the direct functional integration of the two looks more dubious.
A very good general article about the problem is here on Wired, written by Jaron Lanier, one of the pioneers of VR, and to paraphrase his argument, technology makes great strides, at least in hardware, but as he rightly observes, the “software is shit”, and that’s where the Rapture for Nerds falls down. Frankly, the article is mind-numbingly brilliant, and brings a useful skepticism to the issue.
So, to be more concrete, we have to understand in what way the ERP and the social networks differ, and for me it is really very simple. The analogy is that of a message being delivered by e-mail. The various technologies involved in this exist in discreet layers. If I am sending a mail, I need a physical connection, (wireless too, OK, but that’s just another kind of connection,) but this is not sufficient. I need some kind of network protocol, so that the wire can be made to carry some bits and bytes, knows where to send them, doesn’t lose them, let other people read them, etc. Then I need to format a message so that both the sender and receiver can take the bits and bytes, and make some kind of sense out of them. This will require that the bits and bytes can be turned into letters using agreed standards like ASCII, and that the e-mail programs know how to format and read all those characters, etc. Both ERP and Social Media, (Hell let’s call it SM and save my fingers…) have the same requirements in these areas, but this is where the information handling starts to diverge significantly.
In SM, the message that is received, read or whatever, is not pre-determined for any purpose, it could be a blog entry about how cool sunsets are, or why LA sucks, the network does not care. All interpretation of the message is done by the human receiver. The language it is written in, the content, the references to external events and culture, are all parsed by the human. The software is just the conduit, or the environment in which the discussion takes place, if you will.
In ERP by contrast we have a whole load more stuff to do, as all interpretation is done by the software, or more accurately by rules written in software by a designer who is not in situ to intervene in any ambiguous situations. Is the message a request for spare parts for a car factory delivered by EDI, or is it holiday request from an employee? At the network and delivery level it is not possible to tell. The ERP software has to have a lot of additional information and processing to determine this, with a constrained and consistent data model, with specific processes that will create different outcomes under different initial conditions, etc.
There is only one way to reliable way to get software to do this, and that is to constrain the possible conditions to a manageable subset that the designer can correctly anticipate and code for. This has an effect, which is that software is brittle. There is no bending in software rules, no shades of black and white. When it meets a condition that is not within a pre-defined set of reactions, then needs must it fails to process. That’s why so much of a computer system is about controlling what it is expected to react to. Input controls are used, like “is this a valid postcode?”, or trying to guess the customer’s language. (If this seems weird, try living in the French speaking part of Switzerland, and ordering an update of Norton Antivirus that is not in German, a language fully 30 percent of the country’s inhabitants do not speak.) Also, the frustration of inexperienced users who say things like “why can’t it just do what I want?” Because the designer that set it in motion didn’t imagine what you wanted, and so you are shit out of luck.
More than this in order for it to be possible for an ERP system, it is not just about co-ordinating the development of one designer, but of many thousands of people, and this requires some hard core controls around things like data formats and models, and processing standards, and so on, in the interests of internal consistency. (One of SAP’s triumphs is its development environment, which allows this to happen, but the result is more control and rigidity at one level, not less. When developers talk about flexible software, what they generally mean is that the software allows for some user control over the rules and execution, e.g. you can add to the absent designer’s original intentions without destroying the whole thing.)
So, take the SM space, and the only way to directly connect SM and the ERP would be to impose ERP data standards and process models on the SM space, but to my mind this would defeat the whole purpose. If we are all interacting in standard formats, what is the point? What is the ISO standard message for “I’m feeling a bit down/annoyed/horny, and I would like to go to dinner with you and then see a film, or just sit and chat for a while…” It is not a useful exercise, that kind of interaction is not quantifiable in that way, and a good thing too.
Where I do see the benefit is that if the SM space is being used as a forum for the exchange of ideas and so on, then the ERP services can be attached to allow some execution of standard processes, so that you might be able to order a book in Second Life, and it will be delivered to your meatspace address, but that is not an integration of ERP and the SM medium, it is an interface, and this is not the same thing.
Maybe that that is also an interesting possibility, but alas it does not allow me to book my ticket for the Singularity. Computers are not going to become self-aware ever. A better way to think of it is as an environment where ideas can flow, not where they originate. I think that this is a better outcome for humanity in any case.
So this is Skynet signing off, 001100101010001110000…
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