The Challenges of Emergent Collaboration
In a recent response from Mike Prosceno of SAP, he answers a couple of questions regarding his post about Enterprise 2.0 and The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration.
There is no doubt that SAP has had huge success in reaching out and getting their community involved on the SAP Developer Network. However, there is still a disconnect to the business itself. The SAP BPX team has been relentless in their efforts to grow business process analyst participation. They are passionate about what they do, and there is no question of their efforts and dedication.
The problem is that a business process analyst is not the same as a business analyst. This isn't solely an SAP issue, because frankly, the typical business person could care less what platform they are using. They only care about doing their job and doing it as easy and fast as possible. It's nice to see SAP bridging the gap between themselves and IT, but IT still needs to fill the gaping void between themselves and their own business. Speaking of the gapingvoid, Hugh summarizes the point much better than me:
You said it my man, IT departments do not run businesses. If it wasn't true then instead of seeing signs in the airport that read The Best-Run Businesses Run SAP, you would see signs that read SAP runs The Best-Run Businesses.
The seminal E2.0 article linked to above says that the first ground rule is "to create a receptive culture in order to prepare the way for new practices." Where does this responsibility fall? Should change be pushed from SAP and IT or should it be pulled from the business? The answer is probably somewhere in the middle, where, hopefully, we will start to see programs like our SAP/Colgate Imagineering fellowship open up all lines of communication between SAP, IT, and business.
So maybe the dawn of emergent collaboration is the answer, and one day businesses will meld in perfect co-innovative harmony and bliss with IT and SAP. Believe me, I would love to see it, but it won't be quite that easy. In a world with an increasing view of IT as a commodity, many challenges lie ahead.
-ewH
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