What is ICON?
As we all know, Schenker as a logistics company, its IT systems need to be integrated with many external systems from customers, vendors, suppliers, carriers and so on. Among these connections, tens of thousands of messages are generated and processed every day. In Schenker’s IT landscape nowadays, SWORD as an enterprise integration platform, provides the functionality of secured data transmission and transform, between Schenker and outside world.
How does Community-Driven Development look like
ICON 1.0 was developed in 2010. It transferred from a private project into an internal open source software when it comes to version 6 in 2018. Every Schenker employee can access its source code, which makes this software transparent to its end users. Open source in DB Schenker is the first step and shaping it into a Community-Driven Development project is the next step, according to Jake Ma, Head of S2A Nanjing and the initiator of ICON community.
On another hand, ICON community will also be the most efficient way to maintain and develop software like ICON, with committers, developers/contributors and of course end users, taking various roles and responsibilities and therefore working together to make this software more powerful and easier to use.
Jake hopes, “Now, there are 20 users in this community. We would like to engage more active contributors in the coming years and make ICON more popular and add more values to Schenker.”