Middleware was a very big buzzword a few years ago. (Image from the Southern Regional Development Center.)

By middleware, vendors meant software that let people below take advantage of resources above. Queries that delivered reports to managers on how stores were doing, or that placed real corporate data into neat little graphs.

But every organization of any size is based on human middleware. School principals are human middleware. Store managers are human middleware. Party committeemen are human middleware.

These people sit between the decision-makers at the top and those who carry out orders on the bottom. When we like them we call them "sir" or "ma'am." When we want to disparage them we call them bureaucrats.

America has the greatest bureaucracies in the world. We have done more for our human middleware than people in other societies. (Try getting your driver's license renewed in Mumbai if you don't believe me.)

But we can do much, much better.

Software can be part of that solution, but it's only a part.

My piece on open source politics from earlier today applies this concept to one area of life, and one type of organization.

But it applies generally. The problem of human middleware is a business challenge. Which means it's an opportunity.

The fastest way for businesses to increase their profit today is by empowering their customers and their middle managers, by enabling real interaction. It's not enough to deal with demographics or ARPU. The tools exist, finally, to treat customers as individuals, and those companies which do that best are going to be successful.

E-mail is such a tool. Blogs are such a tool. IM is such a tool. Text messaging is such a tool. What we need to do is apply these tools.

For "big box retailers" like Home Depot, this means opening up more channels of one-to-one communication between customers and stores. It also means empowering managers to handle those communications, and promoting those who treat customers best.

We've written about "mass customization" a lot in the last decade, in terms of making clothes that fit people exactly, or cars that conform precisely to customers' wants and needs.

But products aren't the only things that need to be customized. Service needs to be customized, and customer interaction needs to be customized as well.

It's amazing to me just how much friction there is, still, in my daily life. Try to make a doctor's appointment. Oy, vey! Look at your own day and I'm sure you can come up with dozens of examples.

It's just not necessary for us to waste one anothers' time like this. Software can help. But we also need training, and we need to change our management styles to take advantage of what software now makes possible.

This is the biggest management challenge of our time, the problem of Human Middleware. I'll be writing about it more in the coming months, and I can guarantee others will as well.