SAP’s Web 2.0 Smarts
Part One — Tapping Collective Intelligence to Educate

By Rory Doherty
Editorial Director, Optimal SAP Advisor

As the buzz surrounding a new technology-driven trend increases, achieving an accurate and complete understanding of all underlying technical pieces and overarching parameters becomes increasingly difficult. Look too close at the technology bits and bytes, and the all-important big-picture view is lost. Stay too long in the big-picture stratosphere, and risk losing touch with the pulse of technological change.

Today, “Web 2.0” occupies this hallowed, mercurial ground. Over the past few years, Web 2.0 has become an all-consuming vortex, drawing in virtually all things Web related and specifying many different things -- equally valid -- to many different audiences, industries and market segments.

This two-part article will not attempt to define what Web 2.0 is and what Web 2.0. is not. Rather, this article will be a focused look at how a very big company -- SAP, the world’s largest provider of enterprise applications -- is utilizing cutting-edge Web 2.0 tools and techniques to accomplish a Herculean task at a time when the stakes -- from an economic perspective -- have never been higher.

Tapping collective intelligence to educate

Embracing the Web to harness the power of collective intelligence is universally accepted as a central Web 2.0 tenet. On this score, it is enlightening to witness the speed and efficacy with which SAP has tapped the collective intelligence of its ever-expanding ecosystem of customers, partners, consultants and industry influencers to drive an educational initiative of unprecedented scale, scope and importance.

Since introducing NetWeaver in 2003, SAP’s greatest challenge has been to quickly and effectively educate the market on the importance and advantages of a NetWeaver-enabled enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA).

Truth be told, traditional marketing strategies and corporate communication practices cannot achieve the scale and speed necessary to get the job done, a fact that becomes abundantly clear when one considers the sheer size and diversity of SAP’s ever-growing, globally disperse ecosystem which includes businesses of all sizes and spans thousands of industries.

1. SAP Business Process Community
Aptly expressed by research firm Gartner, “SOA shifts developer focus from software to business functions, thereby transforming installed software from an inhibitor to a facilitator of rapid business change.”

In conjunction with transitioning its Business Suite to the SOA-ready NetWeaver platform, SAP had to transform its traditional supporting cast of code-wedded, IT-focused software developers into an army of business process experts, a new breed of consultant who combines a mastery of enterprise technology architecture with deep expertise in global business process design and execution.

SAP launched the SAP BPX community in 2006 as an offshoot of its well-established software development network (SDN). Today, the SAP BPX community is close to 500,000 members strong. Equally impressive is the collective creativity and productivity of the SAP BPX community, which recently culminated in what I believe is a first-of-its-kind community-authored book focused on a specific enterprise technology topic: Process First: The Evolution of the Business Process Expert.

The fact that this book was created utilizing a public Wiki writing platform, and that SAP had the foresight and wherewithal to build a BPX community website resplendent with Web 2.0 technologies and tools, is a testament to SAP’s leadership when it comes to leveraging Web 2.0 advances to drive critical learning. It also says quite a bit about the intellectual capital collected in the SAP BPX community.

By engaging business process experts from diverse backgrounds in moderated forums, Wikis, and expert blogs, the SAP BPX Community drives process innovation through collaboration, best-practice sharing, and collective learning.

2. SAP’s Industry and Influencer Relations (IIR) Program
In lieu of the current economic downturn, there are several key points SAP needs to quickly communicate to the market. Topping the list is the importance of innovating to create differentiation. In the words of SAP co-CEO Leo Apotheker, “Companies struggling with top line revenue must create efficiency, using technology to change processes, and then innovate.”

In connection with this, SAP must educate its ecosystem on the advantages of the SOA-ready NetWeaver platform, upgrading to SAP ERP 6.0, and SAP’s enhancement pack strategy -- reduced implementation time and TCO, greater customer control over in-place upgrades, and better agility and adaptability to sustain a competitive edge in today’s dynamic business climate.

Brand perception and brand value, along with the IT purchase decision process, is heavily influenced today by an ongoing, largely Web-based conversation orchestrated and directed by select industry players and organizations.

Understanding this, SAP’s Industry and Influencer Relations (IIR) program headed by Don Bulmer leverages a wealth of Web 2.0 social media tools to engage these individuals and groups and educate them on important SAP-related developments and future plans.

Influencers targeted through this program include:

According to Bulmer:

The mission of the SAP IIR team is to enable sales execution and accelerated adoption of SAP’s products and solutions. We do this by generating positive experiences of SAP’s brand, products and reputation within strategic business and IT communities of influence.

An important component of the SAP IIR program is the SAP Influencer Summit, an invitation-only event for approximately 500 key SAP partners, bloggers, analysts, user group leaders, academics, and the press.

Communicating key messages to these industry influencers has enormous educational value. What once took months, and in some cases years, can now be accomplished in a matter of days as shared information is quickly disseminated via countless social media outlets, including blogs, online forums, podcasts and webcasts, as well as interactive online versions of traditional media outlets.