introspectiveH

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.

Popularity: 9% [?]

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

Popularity: 15% [?]

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

Popularity: 12% [?]