SAP’s Web 2.0 Smarts
(Part Two: Tapping Collective Intelligence to Innovate)
By Rory Doherty
Editorial Director, Optimal SAP Advisor
Part One of this two-part article examined SAP’s use of Web 2.0 tools and technologies to harness the power of collective intelligence to educate its expansive ecosystem of customers and partners on the many changes and opportunities that accompany the transition to SAP 6.0 and the SOA-ready NetWeaver platform. Part Two of “SAP’s Web 2.0 Smarts” will examine how SAP is leveraging Web 2.0 collective intelligence to help its customers spike productivity and drive business process innovation.
Collective intelligence to drive productivity
Empowering frontline intelligence workers to make critical and timely decisions based on real-time, actionable data is essential to a company’s competitiveness in today’s fast-paced business environment. Given today’s tough economy, the need has never been greater for corporations to make granular data from myriad business applications such as sales, finance, SCM and CRM accessible to execs on the top floor as well as to line-of-business managers.
In Web 2.0 parlance, this practice is often referred to as the ‘consumerization’ of the enterprise. Making great strides on this front, SAP is enhancing its NetWeaver infrastructure to make SAP data accessible in different, user-friendly formats, including its traditional client software, a Web-based portal, mobile devices and, via Duet and the Mendocino initiative, in the Microsoft Office suite running on desktops throughout an enterprise.
End-user usability and customization are foremost goals in SAP’s adoption of Web 2.0 techniques and tools. SAP’s NetWeaver platform also enables the creation and implementation of widgets, small bits of mobile code that can be added to a Web page by a user that provide data or functionality from back-end systems. These widgets enable end users to shape and control how they access and interface with SAP application data and, by so doing, accelerate the innovation and productivity made possible by these new, customized and collaborative views.
Collective intelligence to drive business innovation
Obviously, stability and security concerns disallow SAP from completely transforming its Business Suite applications into unchecked, open-source fodder for the creation of infinite Web 2.0 ‘mashables.’ Nonetheless, SAP has been on the path to enabling rapid, business-meaningful innovation — Web 2.0’s raison d'être in the enterprise — for many years now.
Ease-of-deployment, flexibility and collaboration are the guiding hallmarks of the Web 2.0 movement, and it cannot be denied that the SAP NetWeaver business-process platform embodies these principles.
In fact, the argument can be made that with the introduction of NetWeaver in 2003, SAP, from a conceptual perspective, created the category of enterprise-grade Web 2.0. By making it possible to break monolithic applications into discrete, loosely-coupled enterprise services that can easily be conjoined into composite applications for the rapid creation and deployment of new, innovative business processes, SAP accomplished in the world of enterprise technology what Web 2.0 technology is presently doing in the consumer world.
Potential is one thing. Realization is another. To unleash the full innovative potential of NetWeaver, SAP is tapping the collective intelligence of its customers and partners by forming numerous, purpose-specific communities of innovation.
Approximately 500,000 members strong, the SAP Business Process Expert Community (BPX) bridges the gap between business and IT by engaging diverse members in moderated forums, Wikis, and expert blogs to drive process innovation through collaboration, best-practice sharing, and collective learning.
SAP’s Industry Value Network program brings together leading-edge independent software vendors (ISVs), technology vendors, and systems integrators (SIs) with SAP and customer companies to share information that enables innovation and multi-vendor alignment of business, development, and go-to-market plans.
Last but by no means least, the SAP Enterprise Services Community enables more than 300 leading customers and partners to collectively define the next generation of enterprise services, which SAP builds and then makes available to its entire ecosystem of partners and customers.
Today there are nearly 3,000 enterprise services in the SAP Enterprise Services Repository, more than 100 SAP-branded composite applications (xApps) and numerous SAP-certified partner xApps and countless more under development.
Further leveraging Web 2.0 social networking to spur business-process innovation, SAP recently announced a new SAP technology and innovation pavilion created by InnoCentive and funded by SAP. The aim of the SAP/InnoCentive initiative is to provide a collaborative global platform for co-innovation in which solution providers compete for cash prizes by solving SAP-specific as well as broader enterprise technology oriented challenges.
