computers should be less friendly

View from the cheap seats

If you believe SAP’s vision of the future, the next version of the enterprise will be most certainly be YouTubed. Yesterday, Hasso worked off a set of great blackboard styled slides (anyone have that font?) and even brought one of his classes to the keynote. In his usual way, Hasso cut to the chase about the shifts occurring in enterprise software due to technology and the advent of the social web. Building off Thomas Otter’s live notes and Cote’s mind map here are some thoughts about the keynotes viewed as a whole.

New Idea

His solution to these shifts is his “New Idea” an architectural change focused more on “clouds” that could be used as raw computing power and potentially house enterprise services. The new architecture needs to be event based, must focus on the end user of the application, should be model based and expose little to no code. Probably, the most interesting point here is the idea of event driven thinking.

The “information worker” does not do the same transition repeatedly. They seek out exceptions they look for trends. Part of refocusing on the user will have to allow these users to more affectively locate these fringe events and resolve them. I would also love to see SAP start tracking the root cause of the error — what series of events occurred prior to this issue? Next time could we prevent it? We of course first have to come up with a way of attaching all these systems and getting them talking.

The answer of course is SOA! Hasso does add another interesting spin to this through higher degrees of abstraction allowing a fully model based architecture to enable user to model everything. Obviously, all this is probably still only on the blackboard but, one can see a time with these standardized clouds of services available at will and the ability to have a crowd sourced documentation scheme maybe capable business users could really start to remodel their own enterprise.

Community

Around the community topic Hasso said, “Without a community there is no product,” which is a great hat tip to the folks on SDN /BPX and certainly an important focus for the company moving forward. The idea of using this community to create feature requests is an obvious next step. SAP is only just starting to use their BPX communities to create ES, imagine a time where the users were modeling processes and even changing UI constructs to suit a particular need or usage pattern. This is sort of the holy grail of adaptive UI but uses a crowd sourced to determine the layout and functionality, no need for complex coding!

SAP software generally overlooks the casual users. Hasso argues that these people need to have the UI adapt to their needs as they progress from casual to expert. I’m not sure what this interaction model would look like certainly the hidden menu items in MS Office(before Vista) is not the best way. The idea is great if you can come up with a way to have the UI flex to the user based upon their own knowledge level.

UI

Not all of this appears to be blackboard magic; during Henning’s keynote he “demoed” a prototype of a Web 2.0-ey workspace for business users. This was also shown on the floor also, it has many more features, such as connections to mobile users via Blackberry and having them email into the space to contribute to the project. The general idea of the UI is to allow users to bring people in the space to solve a particular problem. You can add a user to the space, assign users to a task, and use a wiki to help organize the new ad hoc team. The framework supports the notion of templating so you can branch off to do a repetitive transactional type task injecting a good flavor of “best-practice.”

Finding others to help in these new ad hoc teams is easy with Harmony. Harmony is a mySpace/LinkedIn kind of application for the enterprise. It is already running at SAP and I’ve already had some hands on time with it. The interface is very good, has a consistent UI and well done graphics – the whole package looks highly, well unSAPish. The current version only has the mySpace component but I hope they plans to add the other components, wikis, blogs, social bookmarking, etc. This is SAP’s first foray into the social computing side of web 2.0 so no surprise the offer is limited. On the live SAP site you already have started to see interesting groups form like Basketball leagues and Live Music Lovers, not a huge value to the enterprise’s bottom line but happy workers are more productive workers.

Harmony UI

With the addition of a social computing slant, you really start to see the underlying strategy of the user-generated enterprise, at least that was my take on the whole thing.

So I was on vacation in Italy for 2 weeks and during that time all my rails applications went down. Sorry to all the folks out there who were using the SAPlink badge. They, as you can see by the badge on the right, have been fixed. Just to prove I wasn’t asleep at the switch you can check out all my vacation pics ( run for the door if you don’t like stale slide shows ) here on Zooomr.