SAP Walks the Talk with StreamWork

 

By Sam Sliman
President, Optimal Solutions Integration, Inc.

 

With the general availability of StreamWork, SAP is walking its talk of driving business transformation for customers by stepping up the pace of innovation and bringing new solutions to market. StreamWork is among SAP’s first major product announcements since its recent restructuring, and fittingly so.

 

Since being named SAP co-CEOs about two months ago, Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe have hammered on the importance of transforming SAP into an organization that is much faster at bringing new solutions to the marketplace.

 

Enter StreamWork -- SAP’s new on-demand, collaborative decision-making product. Formerly labeled 12Sprints, StreamWork moved with lightning speed from prototype (November 2009) to public beta (February 2010) to general availability (March 2010).

 

In addition to demonstrating SAP’s increased speed in bringing products to market, StreamWork also represents SAP’s commitment to deliver solutions with transformational power.

 

What’s transformational about StreamWork?

 

SAP is not the first out of the gate with a web-based collaborative solution. But among the host of collaboration products available today, few if any, are designed for a single purpose – namely, getting a business activity completed quickly, correctly, at the lowest possible cost and with end-to-end documentation and accountability.

 

It is often the case that the best way to ensure an important activity never gets done is to assign it to a committee. The ‘collaboration’ fostered by many of today’s cloud-based tools often veers into this nebulous ‘committee’ realm -- too many nonessential people involved, too much ballooning and sideways movement, not enough urgency, focus, ownership, forward-movement and accountability.

 

While many of today’s cloud-based collaboration tools simply enable “design by committee,” StreamWork is different. With this new product SAP combines the power and low cost of Web 2.0 technologies and SaaS delivery in an offering that is perhaps the first enterprise-class collaboration tool that businesses can take seriously – and put to serious work.

 

While it is true that one can never step into the same stream twice, the flow of activities and events that constitute a complex decision-making process -- bends, turns, obstacles, resolutions, caveats, consensus, actions, etc. -- can be mapped, marked and stored for future reference.

 

This is what SAP has done with StreamWork’s built-in activity templates for making decisions. StreamWork activity templates range from basic project planning to complex decision making. The templates include prompts and tools needed to keep the decision-making process on point and on schedule -- from the initial activity definition to comprehensive analysis to myriad decision options to consensus and, ultimately, final sign off.

 

The StreamWork user interface is intuitive, and StreamWork provides the structure, centralization and collaboration tools vital to completing a business activity. Whenever a new activity is initiated, it must be named and attributed a clear purpose. The owner of an activity invites the appropriate participants, provides relevant content, builds a timeline, creates action items required to complete the stated activity and assigns these action items to the appropriate participants.

 

We’ve just begun our StreamWork test drive at Optimal, but based on our initial pass, it is clear that SAP is onto something interesting with StreamWork and we are eagerly anticipating more innovation – cloud-based or not – coming out of Walldorf.

 

For a roundup of StreamWork articles and reviews, be sure to visit the Optimal SAP Blog.