SAP StreamWork For Collaborative Decision Making
A few weeks ago I attended a 2-day event SAP hosted for analysts to learn more about what the company is doing. It was a great opportunity for me, as I'll admit SAP has not been a company I have followed very closely in the past. They are clearly putting a lot of effort into modernizing both their image and their products, but I would not exactly start calling SAP "cool" quite yet. In my opinion there were far too many executives in dark suits and even the venue (Boston Park Plaza) contributed to the stogy old vibe. Why not hold the event at a place like the Liberty Hotel which was just minutes away? Every presentation included the word cloud at least a dozen times and talked about "people-centric computing", both of which are good messages but a little 2009/10-ish. Still, better late than never. I will say almost every SAPer had an iPad, so bonus points for that. It may seem like I'm being picky, but these things all add up and the result was an event with a very different feeling that those hosted by IBM, SalesForce, Jive and others that I've attended recently. But enough of that, on to the technology review...
Most of the post-event blog posts I've read were about SAP's in-memory computing technology HANA. While this is certainly an important aspect of what the company is doing, it is not a space I cover. So instead I'm going to discuss with you (over a few different blog posts) 3 areas of SAP's business that do interest me:
A Stream For Getting Work Done
The social software market has no shortage of "Twitter clones" to pick from. While each vendor has a few features that differentiates them from the others, for the most part all the products are essentially the same. Each provides a stream where people can post status updates and share links, pictures and videos. Some products also have special types of posts such as questions, polls, ideas, events, etc. SAP has taken a different approach with their collaboration tool SAP StreamWork (formerly named 12Sprints).
Instead of focusing generically on sharing, StreamWork is designed to help teams work together to make decisions. For example, say a marketing team needs to do an analysis of the sales pipeline and make recommendations on changes to improve lead flow. Instead of using email to go back and forth discussing spreadsheets, the team can create an "activity" in StreamWork. An activity is made up of members who can then collaborate together via a series of posts and responses. The posts in StreamWork go far beyond the standard status updates and link sharing though, and instead offer a huge variety of business tools such as agenda builders, ranking/priority lists, pro/con tables, SWOT matrix, cost/benefit analysis, mind maps, processing modeling workflows and more. They are also starting to build a good partner ecosystem providing integration with companies like Google, Evernote, Box and others.
StreamWork also has a very nice feature that graphically displays how people are connected, offering the typical hierarchical organization chart as well as options such as showing who a person most often collaborates with or even what customer accounts they are assigned to. You can also see "connection paths" which display how people are connected, which can help you get introduced to people similar to the way you do on LinkedIn.
Take a few minutes and watch the video below and you'll see how StreamWork is much more than just another Twitter clone. The ability to insert business tools like SWOT matrix and pro/con tables right into the stream appears to be a very affective way to work.
StreamWork is available either hosted or as an Enterprise version that comes as a virtual appliance that includes the operating system (SuSE Linux), database and application layer.
I have not used SAP StreamWork myself, but it does appear to fit in very nicely with the Getting Work Done theme that I have been speaking a lot about lately. I believe when a "social tool" can provide a way for people to collaborate around a real business process, there is potential for much greater value than just generic "sharing of information."
In my next post about SAP I'll talk about the mobile applications, followed by a post about their new SaaS based On Demand solutions.
Tweet
Most of the post-event blog posts I've read were about SAP's in-memory computing technology HANA. While this is certainly an important aspect of what the company is doing, it is not a space I cover. So instead I'm going to discuss with you (over a few different blog posts) 3 areas of SAP's business that do interest me:
- Social tools
- Cloud based solutions
- Mobile applications
A Stream For Getting Work Done
The social software market has no shortage of "Twitter clones" to pick from. While each vendor has a few features that differentiates them from the others, for the most part all the products are essentially the same. Each provides a stream where people can post status updates and share links, pictures and videos. Some products also have special types of posts such as questions, polls, ideas, events, etc. SAP has taken a different approach with their collaboration tool SAP StreamWork (formerly named 12Sprints).
Instead of focusing generically on sharing, StreamWork is designed to help teams work together to make decisions. For example, say a marketing team needs to do an analysis of the sales pipeline and make recommendations on changes to improve lead flow. Instead of using email to go back and forth discussing spreadsheets, the team can create an "activity" in StreamWork. An activity is made up of members who can then collaborate together via a series of posts and responses. The posts in StreamWork go far beyond the standard status updates and link sharing though, and instead offer a huge variety of business tools such as agenda builders, ranking/priority lists, pro/con tables, SWOT matrix, cost/benefit analysis, mind maps, processing modeling workflows and more. They are also starting to build a good partner ecosystem providing integration with companies like Google, Evernote, Box and others.
StreamWork also has a very nice feature that graphically displays how people are connected, offering the typical hierarchical organization chart as well as options such as showing who a person most often collaborates with or even what customer accounts they are assigned to. You can also see "connection paths" which display how people are connected, which can help you get introduced to people similar to the way you do on LinkedIn.
Take a few minutes and watch the video below and you'll see how StreamWork is much more than just another Twitter clone. The ability to insert business tools like SWOT matrix and pro/con tables right into the stream appears to be a very affective way to work.
StreamWork is available either hosted or as an Enterprise version that comes as a virtual appliance that includes the operating system (SuSE Linux), database and application layer.
I have not used SAP StreamWork myself, but it does appear to fit in very nicely with the Getting Work Done theme that I have been speaking a lot about lately. I believe when a "social tool" can provide a way for people to collaborate around a real business process, there is potential for much greater value than just generic "sharing of information."
In my next post about SAP I'll talk about the mobile applications, followed by a post about their new SaaS based On Demand solutions.
Tweet
