Centralization - The curse of data-centric digital systems?
Abstract
In this talk we look at the successful software architectures that have been developed in the past decades for data-centric digital systems within organizations, collaboration between organizations, and as data-centric platforms for service ecosystems in commerce, finance, mobility, energy and health. They all exhibit a strong tendency towards a hierarchical and centralized structure. We identify the driving forces, benefits and beneficiaries of such architectures but also point out their intrinsic disadvantages and threats not only from a technical but more importantly also from a legal, political and ethical perspective. As a consequence, we call for interdisciplinary (social, legal, economic, technical) design research to foster more decentralized, cooperative, federated, peer-to-peer, or user-centered digital data-management architectures.
CV
Since 2002 Florian Matthes holds the chair for Software Engineering for Business Information Systems at Technische Universität München. The current focus of his research is on technologies driving the digital transformation of enterprises and societies: Enterprise architecture management, service platforms and their ecosystems, semantic analysis of legal texts and executable contracts on blockchains.
He is co-founder and chairman of the board of CoreMedia and infoAsset, scientific advisor of UnternehmerTUM, member of the Münchner Kreis, member of the advisory board of the Ernst Denert-Stiftung für Software Engineering , coordinator of the blockchain.tum.de research cluster and initiator and organizer of international conferences and workshops in software and enterprise engineering. Earlier stations of his academic career are the Goethe-University Frankfurt (Diploma 1988) the University of Hamburg(PhD 1992), the Digital Systems Research Center (now HP SRC Classic) in Palo Alto, USA (Researcher 1992-1993), and the Technical University Hamburg-Harburg (Associate Professor 1997-2002).
Until 2010 he served as dean of studies at the Faculty for Informatics and member of the teaching board of TU München.