Clamoring for Innovation Ideas Using SAP HANA at HANA 2014

Cross posted at the blog at SAPHANA.com…

As I leave the HANA 2014 conference in Orlando this week, I am simply impressed with the enthusiasm I felt from a room full of enterprise architects looking for ways to support innovation for their companies with SAP HANA.

When I was asked to present at SAP Insider’s HANA 2014 Conference in Orlando about business innovation as it relates to SAP HANA, one of my favorite topics, I jumped at the opportunity.  I was pleasantly surprised to find a room full of eager attendees waiting for me at my 8:30AM session this morning.

I always start by asking a few questions to get to know my audience. At HANA 2014 for both my sessions the audience responded as follows to my unscientific poll:

•          50% work for SAP customers
•          50% are consultants serving SAP customers

•          25% are working for customers that already have or are actively considering  purchasing SAP HANA

•          Less than 25% were business analysts concerned with software requirements
•          75% said they are Enterprise Architects
•          A smattering, around 5%, said they are developers

As I said, the poll was unscientific and audience members did answer multiple times in the poll choices.

You can get an idea of the perspective and interest of the people attending a session about building innovative custom applications on SAP HANA. They were not developers, but they were very interested in hearing about how they could support developers in creating innovative applications on SAP HANA.

While it’s not my intention to recreate my session in blog form, I have some interesting takeaways for myself as a result of interactions with the attendees in my sessions.  Check out the slides of my presentation on  Slideshare.

 

1.  When it comes to fostering a “culture of invention” 90% of my attendees companies appear not to partake in more forward looking approaches such as holding company Hackathons or cross functional innovation days with employees. Nor do many of them partake in crowd sourcing programs such as Kaggle, or check out SAP’s crowd sourcing program for SAP HANA customers: SAP Idea Incubator.

2.  Audience members appreciated my “3 Questions to know if you have a SAP HANA Application” slide. Many of their questions were related to geospatial data capabilities of SAP HANA and predictive analytics functionality.

 

 

[SOURCE: © SAP, used with permission] Three questions for determining if your custom application might be suitable for developing on SAP HANA.

What Can Companies Expect from Crowd Funding and Crowd Sourcing?

[SOURCE] Crowds gathered in a Mall in UK.

Originally posted at SAPHANA.com.

Whenever new Internet-based business models are invented, some quickly create new kinds of companies – like Amazon, Google, Facebook and Twitter.  Others mature more slowly such as in the case of crowd funding and crowd sourcing. Crowd funding is finding funding for projects, products and companies from strangers on the Internet with companies such as Kickstarter, IndieGogo, and AngelList helping crowd funding mature. Crowd sourcing is sourcing work or creative ideas from strangers on the Internet with companies such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and 99 Designs successfully showing different models of crowd sourcing.  These concepts have been around since the beginning of Web 2.0, but enterprises are still trying to understand how these might fit into their existing businesses.

Having been involved with SAP’s first crowd sourcing programs, the SAP HANA Idea Incubator, and the SAP Idea Place, I’ve run firsthand into the many different expectations that people have about these concepts. Most understand some of the benefits they might receive, but not the corresponding duties they have to making their project a success. Similarly, I think involving a crowd has some far reaching benefits that only some have set up their campaigns to fully realize.

 

Labor is Obsolete

“He who works with his hands is a laborer.
He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.
He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.”

St. Francis of Assisi

Labor as we knew it is obsolete. It has been for a while. Sure, vestiges of its greatness still exist in certain sectors, especially in civil service. We all still enjoy many of the workforce customs and regulations that organized labor helped put into place – people-friendly perks governing how employers treat workers. But the sway Labor enjoyed from the 1950’s until the 1980’s has lapsed.

Female workers in an H. J. Heinz can factory stamping out end discs (the discs that fit on either end of each can).
[SOURCE] Public domain.

Expecting More From Business — Common Wealth Contributions By Business (Part 2)

Part II of my guest blog at the SAP Business Innovations for Sustainability blog…

This blog is a follow up to my prior blog Expecting More From Business — Common Wealth Contributions By Business (Part 1) where I discuss the book Betterness: Economics for Humans, by Umair Haque as a new standard for how we measure the contributions of business to society.

In this second part, my I want to investigate how well this framework can inspire thinking for “betterness” by evaluating common wealth contributions of a company I know well since I work for them, SAP. Let me be clear that these are my own opinions, and I do not speak for SAP nor any of the programs described, other than the one I directly support for marketing, SAP HANA One.

First we look at indicators whether a company’s management realizes it needs to do more – are they leveraging cause marketing, and are they reporting in sustainability and social responsibility. The second part of the framework examines direct contributions to the common wealth by operations and products.

Many companies are engaging in cause marketing because they know their customers want to feel like they are participating in something bigger than just being part of a market for a company trying to make a profit off of them. Sometimes this is just shallow “cause-washing” such as 10% of proceeds go to fund some charity, and sometimes it’s much more profound.

SAP has the challenge of many business-to-business companies. How do you explain the impact to the average person in the world of a company that sells enterprise business management software to over 250,000 other companies and institutions around the world? SAP does this by telling stories about the impact its customers are making through the use of this software. Often these are familiar consumer brand names that the public will know.  This helps position SAP’s impact as being much bigger than merely selling software.

Two examples of SAP’s brand marketing around “Helping the world run better”. Click images to see original sources. © SAP

Expecting More From Business — Common Wealth Contributions By Business (Part 1)

My guest blog originally posted to the SAP Business Innovations for Sustainability Blog…

Common Wealth Contributions By Business

Much to the annoyance of some past bosses, I have a habit of asking in meetings, “Why are we doing this, and what are we hoping to achieve?”

The economic turbulence of the last dozen years has led to me wondering the same thing about how we humans conduct our economic exchange. Asking the question, “what should we want to achieve in our economies, and how do we measure it?” eventually led me to the short book Betterness: Economics for Humans,  by Umair Haque.

Who Are You Calling an Industrialist, Mr. Seth Godin?

The other day, renowned author and blogger Seth Godin posted his blog “Industrialists are not Capitalists.” He made a point that “capitalists”, as he calls them, are the innovators, and industrialists are the optimizers, realizing efficiency and more profit out of industries created by the capitalists.

Is building a better mousetrap an innovation or an optimization?

[SOURCE: © June Campbell, used according to Creative Commons License]

What Makes a Neighborhood?

What do you consider to be your neighborhood? Is it the proximity around where you live? Is it a sub region of your town or city with identifiable boundaries? Is it a sense of identity centered around landmarks or local institutions such as a school? How much of that is from historical roots of families? Or, is it simply just the relationships between people residing in your area?

Typical neighborhood in Cyprus
[SOURCE: Wikimedia Commons, used under Creative Commons License]

How Platform-as-a-Service Turns Business Ideas into Business Innovation

My latest article for download: How Platform-as-a-Service Turns Business Ideas into Business Innovation

Or see in the online version of SAP Insider.

Adding on New Capabilities with SaaS – Part III of Turning Cloudy Chaos into an IT Strategy

Cross posted from my blog at the SAP Community Network…

This blog continues the discussion started in Part I of Turning Cloudy Chaos into an IT Strategy and Part II – Retreading Existing Systems to Leverage Cloud Technology.  In this blog we examine how Software as a Service fits into a hybrid IT Strategy for cloud computing.

If your company has extensive investments in on premise ERP such as SAP Business Suite, then pursuing an add-on approach with Software as a Service can be an agile way for your company’s departments to roll out new systems of engagement to users. Such a strategy should consider the business needs being solved in relation to other needs within the company such as information management and integration of business processes.

Figure 1: SAP’s vision of end-to-end business processes supported by both on premise and cloud-based applications.

[Source: SAP]

Retreading On Premise Systems to Leverage Cloud Technology – Part II of Turning Cloudy Chaos into an IT Strategy

Cross posted from my blog at the SAP Community Network.

This blog continues the discussion we started with Turning Cloudy Chaos into an IT Strategy Part I.  Here we examine how existing on premise systems of record such as SAP Business Suite can be brought into a cloud-centered IT strategy.

Relationship of benefits of cloud computing to use cases
[SOURCE: (C) 2012 SAP, available under Creative Commons License, use with attribution]