Shen Min, CIO of science and technology innovator Digital China Group: the best practice model is failing, and open source accelerates Distributed Innovation

Shen Min Vice president and President of Digital China group CIO
Bachelor of engineering, National University of Defense Science and technology 、 Master of engineering, shanghaijiaotonguniversity . Previous appointment SAP China Global Support Center Consultant 、SAP Technical architect of digital transformation services in the United States 、 Head of the enterprise planning and business intelligence team 、 Chief information officer of Digital China Holdings Co., Ltd .

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In the communication with Shen Min , Feel that he has a unique “ alienation ” temperament ： No obsession , Not crazy , In the process of growing up, we constantly examine the causes behind the trend of life from a third-party perspective . Compared with internal drive 、 A passionate idealist , He is more like a rational 、 A calm observer , See the world and see yourself .

Understand the meaning of information from the growth experience
Science and technology makers ： When you make important decisions in your life , Is there a consistent principle , Or the ideal that we have been pursuing ？

Shen Min ： From the track of life , There are many options that have not been thought out , Many changes are random .
As 80 after , There is still a lack of information in the process of growing up , At that time, computers and the Internet had not been popularized , Information can only be passed on by word of mouth . In the college entrance examination , Most students 、 Teachers and parents also don't know how to fill in the volunteers , After carefully filling in the first and second batch of volunteers , I am curious to add an early approval volunteer —— The wanjinyou major of the University of Defense Science and technology ： automation , Later, I was directly admitted in the early approval . Students have the opportunity to participate in magnetic levitation during their undergraduate years 、 Beidou 、 Brain computer interface and other major projects , But I was still hoping to get in touch with the new world , Want to study abroad 、 Access to the commercialization system . however 2001 year 9·11 The incident made it extremely difficult to obtain a student visa in the following years , So I chose to go to Shanghai, the most developed commercial city in China, to study as a graduate student .
Join after graduation SAP There are also accidental elements , I was a graduate student at Shanghai Jiaotong University , I have the honor to do some work related to the test and development of mobile display chips in Intel R & D center , The company is in the Zizhu Science Park at the gate of the school , The specialty is also quite appropriate . result 2006 At the end of the year, Intel sold its XSCALE Chip business , My original employment plan was disrupted . Just then SAP Expanding on a global scale , By chance, he joined in , The first time I took a plane in my life was an international flight （ laugh ）.
stay SAP I made an active choice , At that time, most of the colleagues in the same period were more concerned about business finance 、 The sales and distribution module is more interested , Of course these are also SAP The core competitiveness . However, it may be due to the lack of information in the process of growing up , I am more interested in data and information , So I chose the team of data warehouse and data report module , And specializes in the most popular budget planning module （PLANNING）, This module is to eliminate the uncertainty of enterprise operation through planning . General data reports can be understood as addition and multiplication , and PLANNING The module is mainly about division , It belongs to the reverse engineering of addition and multiplication , The threshold is also relatively higher . The disadvantage of the unpopular module is that it often sits on the bench at the beginning , There are not as many opportunities to do projects as other colleagues ; But the advantage is that you have enough time to follow your mentor at the beginning , Learn deeply . Later, the business of this module became popular , The company will have to employ consultants in this field around the world .
2010 Year to go SAP After working in the United States , I will continue to work in the data warehouse 、 The big field of reporting and budgeting , Have experienced SAP HANA The initial implementation project of the memory database . later SAP Merge the products related to the enterprise plan into EPM modular （Enterprise Performance Management） product , It covers the financial consolidation and various business budgets of the enterprise . Later, more and more customers of this product , Most new customers are in the United States , Most of the new development teams are in China , I also cooperated well with the Chinese development team in the United States , So he began to develop and lead the team in the United States .
In retrospect , My professional experience has a lot of randomness , At the beginning of my career , I'm still anxious about this randomness , Fortunately, , The general direction of data and information is also my interest . But later, it was deeply influenced by the philosophy of quantum theory , The world is not deterministic after all , People have to accept probability and randomness .

Science and technology makers ： A little question , Never thought about returning home to start a business EPM Products ？
Shen Min ： at that time EPM Most of the product customer opportunities are still in the United States , So I really didn't think about going back to China in this direction . But I used to SAP My colleagues have done , And it's done very well , I don't think I have much chance （ laugh ）.
A lot of random 、 Accidental factors continue to affect my growth process , But there are things I have been paying attention to in this process , Is the absolute amount of information 、 The cost of information acquisition and the speed of information transmission .
I loved reading encyclopedias when I was young , I started reading in junior high school 、 College physics textbooks , At first, I didn't like it , But in the non internet era , There are not many books available around , You can only see what you have . This is a bit like a full table scan in a small database , The amount of information available is limited and the cost of obtaining information is high . If there were a large library nearby at that time , And have a good list of books 、 Directory guidelines and recommendations , You may discover your interests and expertise earlier .

Science and technology makers ： If you have a chance to go back , Send a message to your past self , What do you want ？
Shen Min ：（ Think for a moment ） Combined with my own growth experience , I don't think the imagination is so tempting （ laugh ）. I think cognition 、 knowledge 、 High value information , Are resources of the digital world , The growth of people depends on the matching degree of resources between the digital world and the physical world , If I knew a lot of digital knowledge when I was very young , But without a computer , 2. There is no application scenario , This knowledge is not so meaningful .
If you really want to send a message , Hope to tell the past me , Don't be so anxious about randomness . But this doesn't seem to be a message , You still have to experience it yourself to realize .
I used to imagine , What would it be like to have a panoramic plan of life very early , This idea was cut off because we realized the key to the matching degree of information and matter , Even at a young age, a person sets up a great ambition , If there is no appropriate guidance and resource matching , May not be able to go on , Instead, we should adjust measures to local conditions 、 Adjust according to the situation 、 It may be better to adapt .
There are many reasons for life growth and digital transformation , In the process of digital transformation , It's not that the more data you collect, the better , Finally, it is necessary to complete the system change in combination with resources and business objectives . There's a joke , A soap box factory wants to test which soap boxes are empty , A computer doctor team has been struggling for a month AI Identification and automation , As a result, a worker moved an electric fan to blow away the empty box . Personal growth , Is to find the right fan at the right time , Piling up a lot of information sometimes becomes a constraint .
Excess profits only depend on the moat
Data chimneys will only grow

Science and technology makers ： stay SAP What details impressed you most during this period ？
Shen Min ： Just in SAP When , More than half of the colleagues who join us are not computer professionals , There are even many students with pure liberal arts background , You have more than half a year to receive various technical training and project training , Including business etiquette and transnational culture , Even learning a driver's license in a foreign country . This pluralistic and international atmosphere , So that we can deal with all kinds of complex problems . We are interviewing physics graduates , You can find a lot of physics Ph. D. graduates to discuss quantum mechanics with candidates ; When communicating with customers in the chemical field, experts can also use details to obtain customers' professional recognition . But domestic enterprises that do cross industry application software and solutions , Few resources and patience are devoted to such training .
Science and technology makers ： These complex training systems , Especially business etiquette , Can it really bring more profits to the enterprise ？ If not , Why are foreign enterprises willing to invest resources to do ？ If it is , Why don't domestic enterprises do ？
Shen Min ： This decency 、 Profession can create value , But it is the upper part of a value pyramid , It needs a solid profit base for the enterprise . There is only one real source of excess profits ： The moat .“ Can create value for customers ” It's the pass line ,“ Only you can create value for customers ” It is a high value line . Enterprise strategic decision makers should constantly think and invest resources to build a moat , Products that can be replaced 、 Services that can be replaced , Are not enough to ensure that enterprises can make profits , Not to mention excess profits .
Some domestic software enterprises have been established for a short time , In addition, we also need to wait for the concept of customers to change , There is not enough accumulation to build its own value system and moat , I believe that the enterprise will build a complete training system when it reaches the mature stage .
Science and technology makers ： The digital China cloud base project you are working on , The digital transformation capability of Digital China has been exported to the outside world to achieve good revenue , What is your moat in digital transformation ？
Shen Min ： I think the moat of the cloud base is a combination of enterprise service experience and IT technology 、 The combination of ecology , And a deep understanding of large enterprise application scenarios . For example , We work with open source software TiDB Our community cooperation is deep .TiDB Most of our initial customers are Internet companies , The business of Internet companies is actually very flexible , For example, I met tens of millions at once / Hundreds of millions of users , The amount of instantaneous data expands very large . What this kind of user pursues is flexibility 、 Scalability 、 High availability , in addition TiDB Compatible with MYSQL agreement , This makes it easy for many business systems in the past to migrate to new database platforms .
Internet companies use MYSQL Used a lot , Because there are many massive data scenarios on the Internet , The chimney barrier of data is not high , Most of the time, you can use a big watch to show the world . But in large non internet enterprises , There are naturally many chimneys , Business has a chimney 、 The data has a chimney ; The user elasticity of internal applications is not so high , The number of employees in an enterprise will not suddenly increase from 10000 to 100000 . therefore , Apply within the enterprise , The function is all ready 、 More than a table 、 High availability is a more important demand for databases . In this regard , In general ,PostgreSQL The protocol database performs better than MYSQL The protocol database is good , We have many enterprise applications built on PostgreSQL On Database . In the U.S. ,PostgreSQL Your activity is about the same MySQL Half of , But in China , Maybe less than one in ten .
In the United States, there are based on PostgreSQL Agreed CockroachDB and YugabyteDB, However, there was no similar product in China at that time . So our team is TiDB On the basis of products , Hope to add a pair of PostgreSQL Adaptation of the protocol , Fill the gap in this direction , So that a database can support MYSQL and PostgreSQL agreement .
On the other hand , We also hope to use this architecture to support our internal application system , I hope to use a set of distributed database and a set of low code application platform , To complete the construction of most agile applications .
Of course, the difficulty of this project is also relatively large , We need to rely on the strength of more communities .

Science and technology makers ： Eliminate the data chimney 、 Data island is the slogan of many digital products , But you think it is impossible ？
Shen Min ： The chimney was not deliberately created , But because of legal and regulatory factors . such as , The law stipulates that the financial data of enterprises cannot be disclosed in advance , Only a few employees knew about it before the financial report came out , Only when the financial report is released will it be made public to all people , And not all the details are disclosed . The same goes for human resources data , It is impossible for everyone to know the salary data of the company , The affairs in the enterprise are operated by professional departments .
You may think that the data chimney is caused by technology , This may be the case when enterprises use a large number of commercial software , Not every commercial software can provide a complete set of interfaces . Now the data chimney is more caused by permissions , Even if all the data is in the same database , Enterprises will also add various permissions to the use of data , The data complexity of an enterprise lies in the association between permissions and multiple data tables .
Data desensitization 、 Data Association 、 Data access 、 Privacy computing and security have become a hot topic .
The reason why the open source model will succeed ：
Best practices fail , The rise of distributed innovation

Science and technology makers ： And TiDB In addition to our cooperation , You yourself have repeatedly expressed your optimistic view on the development potential of the open source model , Can you share your understanding of the value of the open source model ？
Shen Min ： The complete expression is ： With “ Best practices ” This model is used in more and more industries 、 Failure in the field , Distributed innovation will become the mainstream , The open source model can efficiently support distributed innovation .
“ Best practices ” Failure is an important prerequisite , More than ten years ago, people bought software and liked the full set of solutions of giants , A factory 、 A supply chain polishes the operation system to the best , You can refer to it directly , Highest efficiency . But today, a benchmark in the industry has spent several years polishing out best practices , Maybe the external technology and competitive system have changed again , It may be a generation behind when it is directly copied online .
With CRM For example , Tradition CRM In the era of mobile social networking, it has become SCRM, In the past, customer maintenance was to maintain a mobile phone number , A customer needs to fill in a work order 、 Go through the process , Today, everything may be about pulling a group , This system has changed customer acquisition 、 How to maintain customers .
And this is not the end , The times have changed frequently and violently .

Science and technology makers ： You tend to think that it is “ The new stable state replaces the old stable state ”, still “ Best practice this steady-state model will be replaced by persistent instability ”？
Shen Min ： The latter, I believe , In the future, it should continue to change . So the value of open source is reflected , Times change too fast , But the iteration of traditional software development model is not so fast . Even if it is SaaS Pattern , Collect requirements 、 Optimize iterations , It is also a centralized process , There is an inevitable time difference 、 There are trade-offs , Open source is a bottom-up 、 The real-time distributed innovation model can better solve the problem . For example, we encountered a pain point , I have the ability to solve , I may open source the same day , the second day 、 On the third day, industry partners can use it .
This cycle is much faster than the traditional development model and business model , In the past, if there was a small pain point , Commercial software goes through a procurement process , Maybe the problem has disappeared before the process is completed . And open source development 、 And then solve the problem , The cycle is very short , As long as it works , The more mature enterprise customers are, the more willing they will be to pay .
The open source model has many advantages , For example, more professional , Commercial software is often unable to achieve the ultimate segmentation , Because there are too few dishes to serve , No matter how small a sparrow is, it must have all its internal organs , But open source software can be extremely focused ; such as , The time cost of judgment is very low for users , In the end, there are only one or two open source fields that are very subdivided .

Science and technology makers ： Can you share the operating experience of Digital China in the open source community ？
Shen Min ： We recognize the importance of the community , Open source is more than just open source code , It is also the opening of the knowledge organization system and the interaction of the community . In fact, we are just starting to open source , Also in the process of continuous learning .

Science and technology makers ： You mentioned at the beginning of the interview , You are concerned about the speed of information flow , Although everyone shouted “ The world's martial arts are only fast ”, But you seem more radical , It is of great value to save the time of procurement process and model selection ？
Shen Min ： All thinking must revolve around the nature of the world , Matter and time , And time is the most scarce wealth . Both open source and information transparency are conducive to simplifying customers' procurement process and saving selection time , To save the decision-making cost of customers is to save the sales cost of products .
It is based on this thinking principle , I am also very optimistic about the new generation of low code mode . Some friends think that low code is a drag and drop , It is no different from the products of more than ten years ago . But in my opinion , Future cloud based low code , yes API+ Ecological economic combination . In the future, when we are doing development , I will first compare the cost of my own development in the application module with the cost of invoking other people's services , More and more developers will complete innovation based on a mature ecosystem .

Predict the future development of the open source model
Look at low code , Customization is still just needed in the short term

Science and technology makers ： For the future development of the open source model in China , What are your judgments and expectations ？

Shen Min ： First , There will certainly be more professional open source enterprises , There will also be many new open source ecological participants like digital China . On the one hand, we can directly contribute to open source , On the one hand, we can verify open source products through our own scenario experience , Adapt and connect different open source products , Quickly fill in some blank areas , This in itself can bring great help to peers .
second ,SaaS The mode will enter a critical point . current SAAS Many are still competing with each other , Mutual shielding interface . China's SaaS The industry will evolve into an ecosystem of several large platforms , More and more will grow on the platform SaaS application , Underlying data 、 The interface continuously provides nutrients for the application ecology , Integrate and support each other , A good SaaS Will drive another good SaaS, And then drive another good service .
Third , That's what I said , Based on the cloud +API Low code will gradually grow up .
Fourth , Customized demand will still be Chinese characteristics . Compared with foreign countries , The proportion of software customization in China is very high , Even in the same industry , Different companies have very different management needs .
This difference may be related to the current enterprise organizational structure in China . Foreign companies have developed for a long time , Most of the management of enterprises are also educated MBA Trained professional managers , Unique management style can easily be diluted .
in addition , Many industries have very strong industry norms and systems , Enterprises in the same industry have little difference in management behavior , This gave birth to many industries SaaS Solution .
By comparison , The development history of China's modern enterprises is not long , Most enterprises have very unique management styles . Coupled with China's rapid economic development in the past few decades , There are endless opportunities in all walks of life , Enterprises are also constantly exploring new opportunities and tracks . This leads to the process of enterprise management , Common solutions often fail to meet the requirements of enterprises .