FOUNDERS

New Frontier for Software Engineering:
Integration of Process and Service Technologies

by Professors Ram and Yeh, founders of 
Software Engineering Society

C.V. Ramamoorthy (Ram)

R.T. Yeh (Ray)

Outstanding minds of Software Engineering, C.V. Ramamoorthy (Ram) and R.T. Yeh (Ray) never stop to reinvent themselves and, by doing so, push the frontier of software engineering to new heights. So, they founded Software Engineering Society (SES). In SES this is precisely what will happen: Raise Software Engineering to new heights it deserves as the first true transdiscipline – the discipline in between disciplines.

Sometimes it is not easy to appreciate when Ram and Ray start pushing a new frontier. When structured programming was popular they were discussing requirements engineering. When requirements engineering became popular Ram was forming Knowledge and Data Engineering Journal and Ray was pushing Process Engineering. By the time we got grasp of these concepts they are talking about service and process integration. Integration of service and process notions and technologies is so new that it needs some explanation. I hope that I do justice below for their vision.

Ubiquitous Internet is creating fundamental changes in all parts of human societies. It is interesting to observe that recent flurry of activity in business automation on the Internet is producing research results and software tools in an unprecedented speed. How are we going to have an intellectual control and practical benefit in the presence of such massive knowledge expansion?

During the '50s, corporations were preaching management dimensions of planning, organization, integration, and measurement. During the 60’s, thanks to advances on practical main-frame computers, corporations implemented these techniques on main frame architectures. During the 70’s computer languages, databases, and all kinds of software tools become popular. During the '80s, vision, motivation, and collaboration were added to the arsenal of management techniques and transition from main-frame architecture to networked architecture started. During the '90s, we became aware that all kinds of tools and systems we developed during previous decades were essentially for processing data. Currently, although these computers are connected through Internet and other means, computer tools were not designed to aid knowledge workers – they are designed to improve computational efficiency. Ironically, our modern society is moving towards a service economy and the use of knowledge workers are on the rise.

On the business side, instead of pursuing the foundational aspects, the industry is now developing sales force automation, customer relationship management, customer service automation, e-business tools of all kinds, infrastructure products such as data brokers and message/transaction exchanges, etc. In the meantime, the "manufacture, ship, stock and sell" mode of business is giving way to the mass customization type of business models. Viewing these modes side-by-side is like calling home on your cell phone while riding your horse to work. It is interesting to observe that all you need to commit "time" to the customer not "inventory" in this new model.

This observation gives us the importance of appreciating seminal works of Ram on “service” as discussed in his paper “A Study of Service Industry : Functions, Features, Control,” and seminal work Ray and Kozmetsky on “process” as discussed in the “Zero-time” book of Kozmetsky and Yeh. Furthermore, I believe, a theoretical framework for the harmonious integration of communication, computation, and control paradigms for hardware and software has been given in “Fundamentals of Computing for Software Engineers” by Tanik and Chen.

The impact of seminal works of Ram (Service) and Ray (Process) are summarized below in two tables.

Table 1: Emergence of Service Providing

• Global connectivity effect
  Technological advances and ubiquitous Internet.

• Kozmetsky effect
  Convergence of “knowledge-implementation” spectrum.

• Time compression effect
  Change from committing “inventory” to “time.”

• Decentralization effect
  Need for distributed and decentralized operations.

• Human element effect
  Need for team-based service delivery.
  
  

Table 2: Emergence of Process Technology

• Business Process Re-engineering effect
  Corporate investments for reorganization and frustration.

• Globalization effect
  Unavoidability of global competitive pressures.

• Automated Service provider effect
  Need for enterprise-wide secure and scaleable services.

• “Zero-Time” Effect
  Instant use of existing corporate assets and innovations.

• Kozmetsky T-Strategy effect
  Rapid application of core-competency to different markets.

During the coming decade we expect to see complete automation of e-Commerce layer of business; namely the buyer-seller-integrator level. We also expect that Zero-time notions will be a household concept. This kind of practice will finally push the necessity of "engineering" these automation systems for services. We call this Electronic Enterprise Engineering (EEE). The study of EEE is essential for theoretical and practical reasons. Theoretical reason is that it has the potential of tightly connecting theory of languages with Shannon's information theory (even extending Shannon all the way to quantum computing). The practical reason is that it has the potential of stimulating research on meta-fusion -- systematic integration of knowledge. This will clearly signify the end of Cartesian-mechanistic era and the start of combinatorics era in human intellectual development. Who knows, someday historians might also signify this age as the emergence of “light-age” (extensive use of light in technologies) after the long stone-age (extensive use of matter in technologies).

At any rate, next couple of decades will be known as decades of software. Who knows may the “software-age” is just starting. What a good time and place for SES!

M. M. Tanik
A. Ertas

The founders of the Software Engineering Society are both true gentlemen and great researchers with long and prestigious careers in software engineering and related education and research

C. V. Ramamoorthy has been a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley since 1972. Previously he was a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, and Senior Staff Scientist at Honeywell, Inc. in Waltham, Massachusetts. He holds two undergraduate degrees in physics from India. He obtained two graduate degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, and two graduate degrees in Applied Mathematics and Computer Sciences from Harvard. Dr. Ramamoorthy has written more than two hundred papers in Computer Science and Engineering. He has held several positions with IEEE-Computer Society, including that of First Vice President, Editor-in-Chief of Transactions on Software Engineering and Founding Editor-in-Chief of Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. He is a Fellow of IEEE, SDPS and the recipient of several honors including the IEEE Centennial Medal, Outstanding Paper Award, Taylor Booth Award and Richard Merwin Award. He also held the Visiting Grace Hopper Chair at the Naval Post-Graduate School and the Control Data Distinguished Professorship at the University of Minnesota.

Dr. Raymond T. Yeh is the chairman of FunSoft. Previously, he served as the chairman and CEO of International Software Systems, Inc., and Syscorp International. He was also a founding member and the past president of SDPS. Dr. Yeh received his Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1966 from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. He taught computer science at Penn State University, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Maryland at College Park serving as the chairman of the department at both Texas and Maryland. He was the Control Data Corporation distinguished professor at the University of Minnesota in 1983, and a visiting distinguished professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in 1996 and held honorary professorships at four leading universities in China. He is the founding editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and the Journal on Systems Integration. He was the founder of IEEE Computer Society's Technical Committee on Software Engineering as well as its International Conference in Software Engineering. He has published 10 books and over 100 scientific articles. Dr. Yeh has served on the boards of many organizations, and as a management consultants to many nations as well as to industrial leaders worldwide. He is a fellow of both IEEE and SDPS, and is the recipient of IEEE Centennial Medal among his many awards.