introspectiveH

There is an interesting battle going on between the Enterprise Irregulars vs. Robert Scoble and Nick Carr about the lack of sexiness in enterprise software. In Scoble's original post, he asks if anyone knows how to make business software sexy. Fellow Irregular, Michael Krigsman, responded in his blog:

Enterprise software is all about helping organizations conduct their basic business in a better, more cost-effective manner. In software jargon, it’s intended to “enable core business processes” with a high degree of reliability, security, scalability, and so on. These aren’t sexy, cool attributes, but are absolutely essential to the smooth running of businesses, organizations, and governments around the world.

Nick Carr then jumped in with his response:

I'm sorry, but I think Krigsman is the one who doesn't understand enterprise software - or at least doesn't understand what it could become. The distinction he draws between business and consumer applications is specious. Are we really to believe that making software engaging is somehow incompatible with making it reliable and secure? That's just baloney.

Besides the fact that I respect Krigsman and believe that he does indeed understand enterprise software very well, I actually agree with Mr. Carr on this one. Too many times people go down the dangerous path of the "Tyranny of the OR", which Jim Collins warns about in his book Built to Last. Just as Steve Jobs did with Apple, he didn't choose between form OR function or even form OVER function, he decided to embrace the "Genius of the AND" and strive to deliver both.

The enterprise question is not whether to choose between either process over people OR people over process. The answer is to be the genius that realizes that it can be both people AND process. Without this realization, you will see a change of heart in SAP's users of tomorrow that Dan talks about. If you leave people out of your priorities and omit them from your equation, they will find better tools to get their jobs done, even at the cost of your money saving, business process integration. If you want proof, go read my recent experiences with our new global procurement application or the pains of working with data in BI. This isn't a fantasy land, it's reality.

I actually believe some at SAP understand this and that's why you have initiatives like the SAP Developer's Network and SAP's Imagineering Group. You can also see this in new products such as Business by Design, where SAP is trying to make enterprise software accessible for small businesses. It's an internal struggle between the old school German engineering mentality vs. the new school Silicon Valley start up attitude. Only time will tell if they will find balance and harmony of both by embracing the "Genius of the AND".

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Check out this video interview that Dan McWeeney and I did with Cote for RedmonkTV. It was shot during SAP Sapphire in Atlanta to discuss the SAP/CP Imagineering fellowship program.

You can check out the full post on Redmonk.com or on Podtech.net:

In this interview from SAP SAPPHIRE 2007, talks with Colgate-Palmolive developers Ed Herrmann and Dan McWeeney about their Imagineering Fellowship with SAP. After showing their development skills with projects like SAPLink and layering Ruby on Rails on-top of SAP's platform, Ed and Dan were selected to help SAP innovate new and exciting technologies on-top of their platform, business intellegence in particular.

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We are back at SAP Labs in Palo Alto this week after spending one week in Atlanta for Sapphire and one week in New Jersey working on site at Colgate. We are targeting to spend one week each month back at home to make sure our co-innovation goals stay in alignment:

1. Business Intelligence (BI) adoption - How can we increase BI utilization within the organization?
2. Identity Management - Simplify the creation & management of roles and security policies
3. Fellowship Program - Define and establish perpetual Colgate & SAP fellowship program

The first three weeks at SAP, we met with the different groups within the Imagineering team to see if some of their current projects could be useful for some of our high level goals. These guys are working on some cool, innovative things such as Enterprise widgets, project Harmony, and others. We also had meetings with the Enterprise Search and GRC teams as well.

We definitely see some potential co-innovation areas. It would be great to tie enterprise search, widgets, and harmony into BI to create a social platform for business users to collaborate. From SAP's website:

SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence (SAP NetWeaver BI) paints a complete picture of your business to satisfy the diverse needs of end users, IT professionals, and senior management. It brings together a powerful business intelligence infrastructure, a comprehensive set of tools, planning and simulation capabilities, and data-warehousing functionality — delivered through enterprise portal technology.

BI is hot..BI is important…BI empowers your information worker to make critical business decisions…BI is slow, is impossible to use, and makes your people operate in silos. If you want to quickly add 10 years to any business analyst's life, just let him toil his way around a BI system for a while. Sometimes I joke that we spent the first 7 years getting our data into SAP and now it looks like we will spend the next 7 years trying to get it back out. I heard someone else refer to it as the roach motel for data, "Data checks in… but it doesn't check out!"

If your analyst does happen to get lucky and find the data he is looking for by slicing, dicing, drilling, and hammering, only he will benefit. This is where a collaborative, social BI platform would be powerful.

Swivel is a step in the right direction. Swivel allows groups to take a data set and share it, create graphs & charts, comment on it, rate it, and view it differently. Another great feature is the ability to make correlations. You can take one data set and lay it on top of another to view possible trends and relationships, almost like mashups for data. Here is a good example analyzing
Growth of Creative Commons Photos on Flickr. Check out the comments, correlations, and related graphs. This is conversation, not just a dead, static snapshot of numbers.

Markets are conversations and conversations bring together more knowledge. If analysts are truly information workers, then knowledge is power. BI needs to break the chains, bust out of it's silos, and live free.

(Sorry, I couldn't help myself. The image was generated with Web2.0 Logo Creatr)

-ewH

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