Irregulars – Vendorprisey

Complexity syndrome and Rumplestilskin 2.0

Goodness me. I logged on for the first time in a couple of days to see that enterprisey corner of the blogosphere has been in a frenzy. Robert Scoble began it all by wondering what the Enterprise Irregulars thought about the lack of sexiness in enterprise software.

I’m a tad late to the party.

Michael Krigsman, Nick Carr, Jason Wood, Dennis Howlett, Ed Hermann, George Ou, Ross Mayfield, Susan Scrupski, Ian Joyce, Anshu Sharma, Craig Cmehil, Sadagopan, Vinnie Mirchandani, Stowe Boyd and Alan Patrick all chime in, and the there is a lot more I’ve not seen yet. (see Techmeme for more)

As an aside, I do find the blogosphere convention of starting posts with “I’ve met you and gee, you are really a nice, super, kind and smart guy, but now, having said that, I’m going to tell you why you are an idiot.” really odd.

Sitting here at Starship Enterprisey, you’d bet Oracle’s maintenance revenue stream that I’d jump and take up my cudgels to defend enterpriseydom, But I’m not.

Something James Governor said a while ago about IBM nails it for me- The false distinction between consumer and enterprise.

RedMonk has long called for IBM to abandon the somewhat false distinction between “consumer” and “enterprise”. What’s the main difference? Who pays the bill at the end of the month.

I’ve argued before about the dangers of using the “enterprise” as an excuse for complexity, and in the summer I said.

Labelling things enterprise, business or even professional enables a defence of complexity that shouldn’t be tolerated without a challenge.

Full post here.

One of the things that makes me mad is the “enterprise is complex syndrome”. Complexity, not Oracle, is SAP’s biggest competitor. We enterprisey types need some Bauhaus. We can learn a lot from the often brutal simplicity of consumer applications. A focus on simplicity is imperative.

In this sense, Nick Carr is right.

By perpetuating a false dichotomy between the friendliness of consumer apps and the seriousness of business apps, all that Krigsman is doing is giving enterprise vendors cover for continuing to produce software that’s difficult and unpleasant to use. Give Scoble credit. He’s asking the right question, in his own strange way.

Rumplestilskin 2.0

At the same time, anytime a consumer software expert craps on the enterprise gang for not being more like the consumer stuff, I’d politely ask them to do the Rumplestilskin 2.0 Test.

Flickr from YTaP

Apologies to my loyal readers – I have used this before, but for those of you new to this blog:

We provide a room with perfect lighting, beanbags with fairtrade beans, the social media tools of your choice, lattes and other beverages of your choice on tap, eco-friendly pizza and Macbook pros all round, but we only let you out when you have a working polish payroll that offers a compelling user experience. And maintain it. At a profit.

Oh, and It seems we have short memories, or perhaps this is a yuletide thing. Last year Bill Thompson’s Tyranny of the UI post sparked a similar blogosphere spat. I’m now self linking beyond the pale of politeness, but the UI is not the application.

Come to think of it, having a UI at all means a failure to automate. I guess the sexiest UI is no UI at all. This would enable you to leave the computer alone for a while and get on with the real thing.– business time.

0.5.

At the risk of turning this into a SAP infomercial, I received an interesting email today about a joint development (co-innovation in enterprisespeak) With SAP and Wincor Nixdorf.

The challenge here is not bringing 2.0, to the enterprise, but rather 0.5.

How can you bring dramatic process and time savings to lengthly, costly administrative processes on the factory shopfloor without slowing up production lines? How can you provide systems access in a way that makes it easy and fast for factory workers to enter timesheets, access schedules, book holiday, check payslips and the like when they have oil on their hands. I’m not going to call it sexy, but it is damn cool. check out this video (sorry wmv only – note to SAP marketing, stick it on youtube, please)

the power of AND

Ed Hermann, both a builder and victim of enterprise software writes of the tyranny of OR, he is so spot on. He also places this in an SAP context

It’s an internal struggle between the old school German engineering mentality vs. the new school Silicon Valley start up attitude. Only time will tell if they will find balance and harmony of both by embracing the “Genius of the AND”.

We enterprisey types need a big dose of AND.

Steve Mann, commenting over on Vinnie’s post, said,

Vinnie, from my vantage point, there is significant change under foot. Granted it has a long way to go but if you look at the influx of ethnographers and user-centric design teams in the larger enterprise software firms, the Voice of the Customer aspect of interface design is becoming more prevalent. Again, I grant you that companies that have been delivering software for many years without customer input at the front end of the process face significant cultural and process hurdles to get there. I have my doubts that all will succeed. Whether enterprise software can become more customer centric is dependent on the underlying culture of the company trying to deliver it.

Nick, things are changing in Enterprise land. The user is getting a whole lot more respect.

Oh and, flipping it , watching Facebook over the last month, I reckon they could do with a dose of enterprisey.

I’ll leave you with Jason Wood’s take.

Make users lives easier. Sounds simple, but it’s really not

Technorati tags: SAP, Carr, Krigsman, Scoble, enterprise irregulars, enterprise software

SOA and complexity.

This continues my simplicity series (rant).

Joe has a very interesting post over on ZDNET. If you are in Enterprise Software marketing, you should read it if it is the only thing you read this week.

He picks up on a podcast he was on with Dana Gardner, Steve Garone, Joe Neil Ward-Dutton, Jim Kobielus and Trip Chowdhry, an equity analyst MD at Global Equities Research.

Trip’s message is very simple and straightforward: Vendors, please start making some sense to the rest of the world when it comes to SOA. Trip said that the SOA concept holds some promise, but vendors aren’t articulating the message too well. “SOA is definitely a trend, but it seems like the messaging, the product, and everything else need to be simplified, so that people can know how one initiative can correlate and coexist with other initiatives they have going,” pointed out.

Trip bashes SAP:

“If you think about companies like SAP who have very long implementation cycles, they have a lot of moving parts,” he explained. “It’s a complex product, and the problem that SAP has — and to some extent, most of the SOA vendors have — is that they’re trying to solve complexity with complexity.“

When it comes to mass adoption — or the second phase of product adoption that needs to occur to show growth — then you really have to ease the product, ease the message. You have to tell what you do in one bullet point.

This worries me, not just for perpetuation of the SAP is slow to implement myth, but because the the abject failure of enterprise software marketeers from all the major vendors to articulate SOA in a way that customers and the investment community can understand.

(I suppose the one positive from this is that Joe and co picked SAP as a SOA vendor. Normally the analyst types moan that we aren’t SOA enough.)

I’ve been critical of the SOA marketing for sometime, here and here for instance. I commented last year.

The only thing in the world harder than learning German is trying to explain SOA to an audience of HR executives without causing them undue pain and suffering.

Business people want to talk about leaner supply chains, better margins, and fast implementations.

Sam commented a while ago on James’ blog, the post was discussing SOA

I’d go even further James and say that not only is it often superior to present an architecture without mentioning the supposed name of the architectural approach/style used, but often it’s best not to mention the concept of architecture at all.

The desired outcomes and value of the solution to the audience you’re talking to should press the right buttons.

Unless of course the audience is pure software people or technical architects and then their desired outcomes and value can be the architectural approach/style itself. Hence the problem of course … I like to call it supply-side thinking.

At the moment there is far too much recipe and not enough meal.

Every software developer I meet, not just here at SAP, but all over the place, tells me that SOA makes it simpler and faster to build flexible enterprise applications. This stuff then is real, it works.

If folks like Trip, who can probably do Black-Scholes calculations and build value at risk models while in the airport queue, don’t grasp what the marketeers are on about, then perhaps it is time for a big glass of Simple.

The way to talk about SOA is not to talk about it, and just showcase the solutions that it enables. Repeat after me. Short sentences. No jargon. Real examples. Simple is goodness.

Technorati tags: SOA, Simplicity, SAP

SAP Palo Alto, software design and Fred’s steak.

Some of you may have noticed my interest in things “design” over the last couple of months. I have been reading folks like Kathy Sierra , Diego Rodriguez, John Maeda and Bruce Nussbaum. This has led me to all sorts of interesting places on the web, including the Design Museum.

Well, I’m on the fringes of a design project here at SAP, and I have spent the last week in Palo Alto at SAP labs. I’ve been immersed in discovering design led innovation, ideation, personae(s?), artifacts, use cases, and so on.

Design at SAP…

Over the past decade or so, we have received considerable and often valid criticism for an overly complex GUI experience.

This isn’t good. To quote Dan:

I would argue that for the next generation of people who will soon ( < 10 years ) start to get into decision making positions at Fortune 1000s UI ease and flexibility will be nearly as important as all the process stuff already boiled into SAP software.

Fixing it.

A couple of years ago Hasso Plattner set up the Design Services Team (DST). The goal is to bring a stronger design ethos into our software development process. The team works with developers around the world to instill a user-centric design discipline. They also work to identify new design trends and provide expert services to other organisations looking to focus on the user. Shock horror they actually work with real end users to see how they use our software. The team is multi-disciplinary, and many of the team members have a design background and come from places like eBay and Apple. Internal design missionaries, if you like.

It is alot more than just GUI…

This is what they mean by design thinking

The core values of Design Led Innovation:

Have an Outside-in Mindset
Use Empathy for Users & Stakeholders .Embrace diversity
Think holistically
Collaborate in multi-disciplinary teams
Generate many new ideas
Find & iterate alternatives
Fail early and often

Hasso has donated lots of money and time to design. He donated 35 million to the Stanford Design School and has also invested significantly in the Hasso Plattner institute in Potsdam. I’ve blogged this here. The DST also facilitated the developer challenge- you can find more here.

This project – what I learnt.

We are working at dramatically improving a complex, messy, global, internal process at SAP, both from a process and eventually from a product standpoint. The workshop included internal end users, managers, solution management, design folks and me.

My job was to provide a look at the competitive landscape and to explore how social computing might impact the process. (I’m being a bit cryptic about what the process is, as the process owner would rather I’d not blog it)

As part of the project the DST is doing similar sessions with users from various industries and sizes in the US, Europe and Asia, some of them SAP customers, some of them not.

My key takeaways from the process.

It isn’t easy.

“Post-its” rock.

The rules. Not bad rules for any brainstorming process.

An aside:Jeremiah documented the process and outcomes live in an internal wiki, which in itself was an interesting 2.0esque validation for me. I spend lots of words pontificating on the power of the wiki, but actually seeing it used as a real time documentation tool, rather than just as a repository of record for documents created elsewhere, hit home.

Thanks to Loren, several Mikes, Jeong, Erin, Jing, Matt, Peter, Pam, Vivien, Ben, Diana, Christoph, Harry, Ben and Jeremiah (sorry if I’ve forgotten anyone) for an eye opening learning experience. And to Mike and Doree thank you for a wonderful evening and the introduction to Fred’s steak and Arrested Development.

In other news Jeremiah and I have a chat with James and Cote on Redmonk radio. I ramble on about the DST and ERP amongst other things. It is weird listening to your own voice. I have neither the voice nor the face for radio.

For those that write SAP off as an innovation-free zone, I say watch this space.

Technorati tags: SAP, Design, Palo Alto, Redmonk, SDN blogger, enterprise irregulars

What release are you on?

In many families, the Christmas holidays is the time to play games. Homes ring to the sounds of happy or not so happy people playing Trivial Pursuit, Scrabble, Charades, Cranium, Monopoly, Pictionary and so on. Details of our family Christmas will no doubt be recorded over on my wife’s blog.

Undergraduate university students, on the other hand, play complex drinking games. Actually they do that all year long.

When I was at University I believe there were several games played by other people that involved bouncing a coin into a beer glass. Apparently, this game takes lots of practice. I’ve been informed by a reliable source that if you managed this feat, you could nominate a fellow player to have a gentle sip of his-her beverage. It seems if you managed it three times in a row, you could make a rule. Hypothetically speaking this game could continue, much like cricket, for a considerable amount of time. I assume that after a while, the rules became so complex that only the law students could continue.

It has been suggested to me that the typical rules included: Only sip with your left hand, only point with your elbow, place your other hand on your head, recite the motto on the beer can without looking (Castle lager, the taste that stood the test of time; Black label, America’s lusty, lively beer ) address everyone by student number, hop on one leg and every sentence had to include one Latin maxim- without repetition or hesitation. I could envisage that once you got the hang of the rules, someone would get it in four times in a row. Apparently they could then change any rule they like.

If you would like more details, please refer to the wikipedia entry for the simpler, cruder, American version, called quarters.

Enter the software release naming convention game.

Start with a three letter acronym for a company name. Bounce coin. Add another acronym. Bounce coin. Add another acronym. Bounce coin. Add a pronoun as a prefix. Bounce coin. Add an arithmetical sequence. Bounce coin. Add decimal points. Bounce Coin. Randomly skip bits of the said sequence. Bounce coin. Add a year to it that has no relevance to the year in which the software ships. Bounce coin. Add an X. Bounce coin. Add powered by. Bounce coin. Create an internal technical name with another three letter acronym and its own numbering system. Bounce coin. Create integration concept with another three letter name. Bounce coin. Start again. Use up all marketing budget printing new extra long business cards.

When I look around, most software companies play this game. You may have seen the Microsoft parody on youtube. (tip Seth Godin)

There is a tremendous amount of work going on at SAP to develop a culture of simplicity in development. This is goodness, but I think we need to take the coins off the product naming folks and lock them in a room with the simplicity gurus– No more coin bouncing until you know and live the laws of simplicity.

Technorati tags: SAP, Simplicity

Adobe Apollo and SAP, aka Basil don’t mention the GUI

The folks over at techcrunch have had a look at Adobe’s Apollo.

2007 will bring the launch of the much anticipated Adobe Apollo platform, a cross platform run time that will allow developers to take rich Internet applications, whether they be built on Flash, HTML, JavaScript and/or Ajax, and turn them into desktop applications.

Michael goes on to comment.

I had the opportunity to interview Kevin Lynch, Adobe’s senior vice president and chief software architect, about the upcoming launch of Apollo. Steve Gillmor joined me as well. Listen to the 37 minute podcast over on TalkCrunch, and let us know what you think Apollo’s “killer app” might be.

The cast is definitely worth listening to. Michael sees email and calendaring integration as the killer app, but I reckon there is a bigger play in the Enterprisey space. Kevin and Steve mention the SAP-Flex stuff. Adobe has the opportunity to become a major part the enterprise application experience, ERP CRM etc….

I liked the term grown-up widgets. Ans the cast was spot on when someone said something like, “The world work is a mixture of the cloud and the local machine.”

Matthias Zeller led me to the Techcrunch post. (Thanks) He is a leading chap in the SAP-Adobe relationship. Judging by the name you would probably bet serious money that he works for SAP. Haaa he doesn’t. He is at Adobe. This destroys my theory that all clever Germans work at SAP. Check out Matthias’ slideshow from ASUG about how Adobe can change your SAP user experience.

James from Redmonk is big on Adobe, so am I: My blog is littered with Adobe SAP happy families. Anything that makes SAP hipper and slicker is goodness.

Adobe is a big SAP user, so they have the opportunity to experiment with their own internal petri dish. I’d love to see what their internal ESS and MSS stuff looks like. (If anyone from Adobe is reading this, please drop me a note)

The enterprise user experience is going to change dramatically, check out Filip’s blog on SDN for more. He explains muse and gives some good insight into what is cooking in the SAP kitchen. All that SOA business is what helps make this stuff possible in an enterprisey context.

It might be fun to do demos again.

And that reminds me of another sketch…..

When I wer’ lad, we had t’ demo wit’ dull thin html screen

You were lucky , when I were a lad we only had SAP GUI

You were lucky, when I were a lad we had t’ demo with SAP GUI and all the demo data was in German

You wer’ lucky, when I wer’ lad we ha’ demo with a green screen in German and Assembler.

You were lucky when I were a lad we had to demo with an abacus.

We were happy in those days

Aye, but you never had to do a demo in a shoebox on the motorway while eating coal

If you try and tell the young folks of today, they won’t believe you..

The orignal, funnier version is here.

Technorati tags: SAP, Adobe, Techcrunch, Redmonk, Apollo

SAP and the Simplicity. SAP and Second Life..

Yesterday I mentioned YouTube as a marketing channel, and the day before I wrote about simplicity. Someone in the press release department is reading my mind. This press release arrived in my inbox this evening. I quote….

The second annual Developer Challenge brought together a select group of SAP developers from around the world to collaborate and compete to solve a creative problem. The topic of this year’s challenge, “Creating Simplicity: Innovation’s Great Paradox,” challenged contestants to develop new software based on, or extending, an existing SAP product that addresses one of four dimensions of simplicity: user interface, technical design, consumption or overall product experience.

This morning, I saw this post on SDN from SDN’s resident Austrian Comedian, Mario Herger.

The loudest sound you normally hear in the Silicon Valley is the buzz of the thousands of computer processor coolers in the Garage startups or the counting of the billions of venture capital money thrown at soon-to-rule-the-internet companies. But that past weekend, 42 of the meanest SAP developers and 6 UI designers flocked tgether, split into gangs of 8, saddled their horses and spent Saturday and Sunday sweating over their laptops to churn out real cool stuff.
Under the overall theme “Simplicity” – What do you need in the Wild West? A horse, a pistol and a sunset to ride into – top SAP developers and designers made that reality.
Stop, stop, hold your gun: SAP & Simplicity? How does this go together? Tar and feather the impostor telling us that this is possible.
Well, I tell you: It is possible. Over 48 hours without sleep, the 6 gangs just did, what the simplicity bandits at SAP tend to “featurize”. But we had the Simplicity Sheriff Aliza Peleg, in her more mundane life the general manager of SAP Labs, who took care of the simplicity bandits.

This is the slightly odd video introducing the weekend’s Challenge.

The winning entry

The eight members of team “Mission Simplicity” took the top prize with a demo that connected an SAP back-end system running an online store to the Second Life virtual world, which is regularly visited by more than one million users. The Second Life client program provides its users (known as Residents) with tools to view and modify the virtual world and participate in its virtual economy, which concurrently has begun to operate as a “real” market.

Here it is:

The second place went to Team “S.W.A.T.7.D.” with an RSS system that aggregates data from SAP and non-SAP systems and the Internet, enabling end users to personalize and “pull” information into customized widgets running on the desktop.

This may interest the RSS guru, Charlie Wood.

The third-place demo, presented by team “Abracadabra,” showed a sticky-note application that stores data contextually within SAP and non-SAP screens.

I wonder what the licensing implications of SAP in Second life will be? Vinnie will need to set up an Avatar to beat us up on the Linden Dollar licences.

Technorati tags: SAP, Second Life, simplicity, RSS

Compliance (GRC) SAP, IBM….

I’ve written about SAP GRC in the past, but figured it was time for an update.

At the recent analyst meeting, Doug Merritt covered SAP’s GRC story. It is well worth a watch. He clearly articulates SAP’s strategy and progress to date. Slides here. Doug looks after GRC, Analytics and Usability, an important job indeed. He came from PeopleSoft a couple of years ago and has done a great of job of balancing “I’ve got a whole lot of great new ideas” and respecting our weird Walldorfivian ways.

Business is good, strong Q3, product development on track, strong road map and the go-to-market is going well. Since launching GRC, the analyst firms have picked up on term, so rather than play catch up I think there is an element of (and I hate this term), shock, horror, thought leadership. This GRC market is growing rapidly, and it not just about SOX. Risk Management, in the longer term, will be very significant. (see demo here)

The SAP site for GRC took me to a Deloitte podcast with Lee Dittmar from Deloitte , Robert Worrall, CIO, Sun Microsystems; Holly Roland, Senior Director, SAP GRC Solutions Marketing, SAP; and Steve Taylor, CEO, Resolver Inc. You need to register on the Business Trends Quarterly site to listen.

IBM’s purchase of Consul vindicates SAP’s Virsa purchase, does this mean that the compliance space is consolidating already?

IBM to acquire Consul risk management, Inc. “Auditor-in-a-Box” Software Deal To Help Protect Clients From Internal Users Accessing Unauthorized Information

ARMONK, NY — December 5, 2006: IBM today announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire Consul, a privately-held software company headquartered in Delft, Netherlands with a principal office in Herndon, Virginia. Financial details were not disclosed. The acquisition is subject to regulatory approvals and is anticipated to close in the first quarter of the 2007 calendar year. Upon approval, Consul will become part of IBM’s Tivoli software unit.

I haven’t seen the Consul product.

I’m suprised that Oracle haven’t bought something in this space. I would have thought a cool compliance product that could connect across dozens of products orginally from different vendors would be just what the doctor ordered.

Technorati tags: compliance, SAP, Oracle, IBM, enterprise irregulars