"Many German manufacturing companies, including Siemens, are now building software, artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities and strengthening the collaborative ecosystem within the Industry 4.0 platform to stay out of the digital age."

Thomas Han, Chief Software Officer (CSO), who recently visited Korea, emphasized this. Siemens is a leading German company that has succeeded in transforming its business structure from traditional manufacturing companies to renewable energy, health care, energy management and smart factories.

Thomas Han CSO helps strengthen SW capabilities in each area of the company. Siemens has been named as "Chief Professional Officer" for 10 fields internally, and SW is one of them. Having CSOs apart from the Chief Information Officer (CIO) cannot be found in German companies.

"Around 20,000 of the 32,000 internal research and development personnel, 21,000 are SW development workers, and only 200 are AI experts," said CSO. "Siemens is already world-class in SW competitiveness.”

Siemens has invested more than USD 10 billion to strengthen its SW capabilities 10 years ago and has also entered the world`s top 10 SW sales.

"Even AI, which has recently become a hot topic, has not been exposed like Google, Microsoft, or IBM, but has been highly integrated with its products and services," mentioned CSO.

Siemens is establishing `Vision 2020`, a corporate future strategy based on SW and AI, and pursuing power generation, automation and digitization from product development to service delivery. For example, the company`s wind farms use AI to optimize usage and use AI for weather forecasts.

One CSO commented, "The German government has achieved considerable success by building a cooperative ecosystem that helps the competitors compete with each other for the purpose of economic growth." While Siemens and Samsung have different paths, it needs to set up a business model and build a cooperative ecosystem in which all researchers and unions participate. Regarding the government`s role, he emphasized, "The government has to do basic roles such as creating a standard platform for companies to work and supporting global cooperation."

Meanwhile, he also expressed interest in SW education. "In the digital age, it is not advisable to give SW education to a specific group of students. But SW education should focus on understanding computer science, not just simple

By Lee Gyung Tak kt87@


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