Here’s an example of “augmented corporate reality” based on the Layar platform and the SAP BusinessObjects ondemand.com platform, running on a Google Nexus One Android phone.

These are all screenshots taken from a working proof of concept, shown as an example of the type of functionality business users might have access to in the future — not with any promise of such a product in the future.

Open the Layar application, look at the list of available “layers”, and choose the SAP Web 2.0 Augmented Corporate Reality Example
The application opens the camera’s phone, and connects to a business intelligence server to get information about the customer businesses closest to the current location. This information is shown in the small radar screen in the top right, and an icon for each customer is shown on the screen. As the phone moves, the icons appear to stay in one place, hovering over the physical location of that customer’s building. Each icon indicates the customer’s sales performance (the arrow direction shows the trend, the color indicates whether or not sales have reached my target or not). The size of the icon indicates roughly how near or far the office is. The application automatically highlights the location closest to the center of the display, and shows more information about that business (name, distance, photo, current and previous sales, and sales target)
Users can click on the selector in the top left to see the customers as a list, ordered by distance from the current location (realistically, this is likely to be the easiest, most popular location-aware information use)
Alternatively, we can see the customers, and their performance icons, shown overlaid on a map.
When the user clicks on one of the icons, they see more data about that business, and can click on the “Get Data” button to drill in for more information.
This takes them to a live report hosted on the SAP BusinessObjects on-demand business intelligence environment…
…where they can drill into the numbers, open other reports and charts, etc.

We hope to open up the prototype for use by others, with the ability to add other example locations, etc.

What could businesses really do with this? Well, maybe you’re a branch manager, and you want to get the latest sales figures as you visit the branch:

Or a factory manager who wants to see the maintenance records for a particular machine:

Or you’d like to compare performance of goods displayed inside the store with the goods stored in the shop window:

What you can do with this technology is currently restricted by the location services: realistically, it works well for identifying building locations outdoors using GPS, but is not yet precise enough for most indoor use. However, this is changing fast as vendors offer new location services, based on cell-phone, wifi, and other forms of signal triangulation.

How far could this go? Well… take a look at this video:

SAP’s decision-focused collaboration project, 12sprints, is now in “open beta”, so that anybody can sign up. Here’s the blurb from the web site explaining what it is:

Bring order to chaos and transform teamwork into results quickly. Collaborative decision-making brings together:

• People - Get everyone on the same page
• Information - Share documents and data all in plain view
• Methods - Provide structure with business tools for brainstorming, strategizing, and decision-making

And it’s built for speed - use for free and be up and running in minutes!  Learn more

For an introduction to a typical activity structure, and a real-life example, please visit this post on TimoElliott.com

Here’s a video explaining the new Rooftop Marketplace Prototype from SAP Research in Switzerland. It shows how you can easily wire together the outputs and inputs of different mashup widgets to create an application workflow. You can easily mix and match mapping, core SAP systems, SAP BusinessObjects analytics (Xcelsius), and the new 12Sprints collaboration environment, and the system uses collaborative techniques to rate and automatically prompt appropriate widgets based on your context.

You can get more details about the project in this blog post by Volker Hoyer.

France has a plan to put the latest 2.0 technology at the service of its citizens called Le France Numérique 2012. It outlines how the government intends to:

• Provide everybody access to digital networks and services
• Develop and provide new digital services
• Grow the number and usage of digital services by companies, government departments, and individuals
• Modernize the governance of the digital economy

As part of the plan, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, the French Deputy Minister for the Development of the Digital Economy launched a call last spring for innovative web initiatives. One of the selected projects, led by SAP Research, is called ARSA (“Analyse des Réseaux Sociaux pour les Administrations”, social network analysis for government authorities).

The project uses the Social Network Analyzer (SNA) technology from the SAP Business Objects Innovation Center to improve collaboration and government transparency in the public sector, laying the foundations for “Administration 2.0”.

A press conference this morning in SAP’s Paris headquarters hosted by Vincent de Poret outlined the project’s goals. Gilles Logeais, the Research Director for SAP Research France, explained that the two-year, €1.3M project will be carried out in partnership with the town of Antibes on the French Riviera, chosen as a representative mid-sized French town, with around 75,000 inhabitants and a wide variety of public services.

With help from students of the prestigious Ecole Centrale Paris engineering school, and a local cloud computing platform partner, Euclyde, the team will research how best to use social network analysis technology for government departments and local authorities, in order to:

• Optimize collaboration within public-sector organizations
• Improve transparency and convenience for citizens accessing services (who does what)
• Improve the ability of public-sector organizations to understand and react to the needs of citizens (who needs what)

Vincent de Poret, Cedric Ulmer, Alexis Naibo, and Gilles Logeais of SAP

Alexis Naibo of the SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center gave a demonstration of the SNA technology, explaining how it can import data from a wide variety of sources including internal business applications, corporate databases, and external interfaces. Once the data has been gathered, people can search for experts and discover relationships using an intuitive interface.

Today’s organizations are increasingly complex, with frequent reorganizations and many cross-functional teams and initiatives. The result is that the standard corporate hierarchy, which is often the only relationship information available, rarely reflects how people really work together. Many people today are active members of professional social networks such as LinkedIn or Viadeo, and want it to be as easy to find an internal contact as it is externally.

SNA has the potential to gives a more complete, 360 degree view of collaboration in the organization, leveraging the knowledge already embedded in corporate applications such as human capital management, customer relationship management, and project management systems.

The prototype makes it easy to understand existing relationships between people in much the same way that traditional business intelligence systems help organizations understand data stored in their corporate systems.

Unlike consumer-oriented social network tools that only support one type of relationship between individuals (“I know X”) and a limited, predefined collection of data attributes, SNA supports multiple different types of relationships between both individuals and groups, and organizations can easily adapt and extend the information and links contained in each individual’s profile.

Anything technology that touches on relationships between people requires sensitive handling, and SNA is designed to meet all the technical, legal, and organizational requirements for data security and governance, by incorporating fine-grained control over information access. In addition, the platform is designed to fit seamlessly into existing environments, supporting standards such LDAP and Google’s OpenSocial, and with integration to mobile devices and corporate email accounts.

Alexis explained that the prototype has been implemented as a beta project within SAP and has proved very popular with employees. As a standard part of the internal company portal, all SAP’s approximately 50,000 staff have access to the solution, and it is used thousands of times each week.

An open SNA demonstration is available online for anybody would like to understand the technology, at http://sna-demo.ondemand.com

SAP is still investigating how best to package and commercialize the SNA prototype, but there has been considerable interest from potential customers, notably as a seamless part of specific SAP business vertical and functional applications.

Cedric Ulmer, the research project lead for SAP, explained that town of Antibes, like any other organization, needs to work as efficiently as possible, but as a public organizations must also be as transparent as possible with its citizen customers. The first phase of the project will be to adapt the SNA technology to the town’s particular needs. Cedric cited some applications that might be of interest, such as:

• Understanding the complex links between the local authority and the many different suppliers that compete for public contracts, and the relationship between those different suppliers
• How the local authority can best collaborate with the wide range of different local associations (sporting associations, business groups, etc.) to meet the broader needs of local citizens

Other articles:

• A social network for the French Administration, by SAP (in French) (Google Translate version)
• SAP wants to build a social network for the French Administration (in French) (Google Translate version)
• SAP and Antibes implement social networking (in French) (Google Translate version)

Antibes image adapted from original photo by Valeria Cerutti

SAP Influencer Summit

Let’s start with the SAP Influencer Summit. You can see the full list of recorded keynote sessions here (registration required). If you’re interested in SAP Web 2.0 technology, you’ll find examples in the presentations by Jim Snabe, Visha’l Sikka, Marge Breya and John Wookey.

And take a look at one of the featured videos, about “Real Real-Time Computing”, a subject that came up regularly throughout the sessions:

Several hundred people attended the event in Boston, and there’s been lots of coverage, from the analysts and bloggers who attended – here’s a small sample:

• InformationWeek: SAP Outlines Five-Year Enterprise Plan
• ITBusiness.ca: SAP Wants to Transform its ERP Image
• SearchSAP: SAP: We’re Serious about SAP On-Demand
• InfoWorld: SAP plans to open up on-demand development platform
• Ray Wang: Event Report: 2009 SAP Influencer Summit - SAP Must Put Strategy To Execution In Order To Prove Clarity Of Vision
• Oliver Marks: The Clear Path Forward for the SAP SuperTanker
• Merv Adrian: SAP Promises Acceleration on a “Clear Path” – Will it Be Enough?
• Mark Smith: SAP Broadcasts New Enterprise Software and Applications Strategy
• Michael Krigsman: SAP ByDesign: Taming the Multi-Tenant Beast
• James Governor (@monkchips)’s post SAP: Out with the Old, Shrugging Off The Tag
• And a whole collection of articles from the Enterprise Irregulars and other bloggers

There was also a full virtual conference set up using the inXpo platform. I’ve used this platform several times in the past, when it has been used to recreate a “virtual show floor experience”, and I’ve found it to be a frustrating experience.

On this occasion, I think it was used much more successfully, to show the keynote presentations live and to host “ask an expert” sessions.

But crucially, there wasn’t any attempt to use the platforms closed communication tools – the backchannel was kept firmly in the open, where everybody could see it. There was a clear hashtag announced in advance (#sapsummit), and attendees were encouraged to use it.

It was clear in advance that Twitter would be the key backchannel for the event. The Enterprise Geeks did put together a public Google Wave for the event and encouraged others to help summarize content. But as Mark Madsen remarked:

“Tried to use Google Wave at #sapsummit, found that the UI is terrible, abandoned quickly”.

And — at least at the time of writing this — the resulting Wave is a lot closer to a messy email thread than a tidy wiki page.

Many of the invited attendees were Twitter users – in the Web 2.0 world, an active stream of Tweets is rapidly becoming considered essential part of doing business (at Le Web, technology evangelist Robert Scoble got very angry when he heard French Tech CEOs were too busy to have a Twitter account).

The #sapsummit conversation opened as people announced their travel plans, and quickly accelerated as the sessions opened on the first day. If you’re interested, you can see all of the tweets here in an 8Mb pdf document, from http://wthashtag.com/sapsummit.

Rather than just being a discussion forum for the audience, SAP employees used Twitter to clarify points made by the presenters, monitor feedback, and reacting it. And as the presenters came on stage, several of them mentioned that they had been watching the feed, and then addressed any points that had come up. As I tweeted early on:

“Looking at twitter feed from #sapsummit, I get the impression the “backchannel” is becoming almost the front channel…”

Jonathan Becher, SAP Executive VP of Marketing and host of the event gave his impressions in a blog post about the event.

“When I was asked to be the “official” blogger for the SAP Influencer Summit, I assumed that it would end up following a similar flow as I used for SAPPHIRE 09 earlier this year.  That is, I would write up some short observations after each of the morning’s keynotes and post them throughout the day.  Later in the evening, I would provide some more general observations about the event, with perhaps some on-site tidbits to share with those that couldn’t attend in person.

It didn’t turn out that way at all.

I wrote the initial post [about the Summit] during the relative calm of the night before the Influencer Summit.  I planned to write my second post during the break after Jim Snabe’s and Vishal Sikka’s morning keynotes.  Since we expected that the influencers to be very active on twitter, I also decided to monitor the #sapsummit hashtag live during the morning keynotes.  If specific issues came up, I could respond to them myself and, if anyone made any relevant comments, I could refer to them during my slots between the other presentations.

I knew that I was going to be busy but I wasn’t quite prepared for the firestorm of tweets… [not] just from the attendees in the room but also from those attending virtually. All of this meant I had no time to write the second blog entry…”

During the Q&A session with John Schwarz (left in the photo above), Jonathan also had an earphone and an audio feed that could give him feedback of audience reactions.

As I remarked on Twitter,

“#sapsummit is the first I’ve seen that comes close to using the possibilities of real-time Twitter”

And not just in real-time. The tweets themselves are a valuable resource that SAP can use to collect and study reactions to the presentations. As Vinnie Mirchandani (@DealArchitect) mused :

#sapsummit wondering if SAP or someone else is mining the huge tweet stream - lots of instant reaction from so many watchers

And he went on to hope that SAP would summarize the feedback as a follow up to the summit. One of the interesting opportunities in this area is sentiment analysis on top of Twitter, using SAP BusinessObjects Text Analytics – here’s a taste of what that could look like (demo data).

And a couple of days after the event, Jonathan Becher tweeted on progress:

Working on sentiment analysis for #sapsummit: OnDemand & ByD top mentioned terms, keyword with most positive mentions: BusinessObjects

Le Web

The annual Le Web conference in Paris is a much larger, general conference, focused mainly on consumer web technology. It also featured (excellent) live video-streaming of presentations (using USStream), and also had a very active Twitter channel (#leweb), with over 15,000 tweets from over 5,000 different people.

But interestingly enough, there was a much clearer separation of the presenters and the audience. I didn’t watch all the sessions, but the backchannel – although very active – seemed to stay firmly in the background. There was no obvious interaction between the people on stage and the people watching and tweeting – the closest I saw was the tweets that both Queen Rania, and Nathalie Kosciusko Morizet sent just before going on stage.

Even sessions all about Twitter, such as the Twitter Apps Panel didn’t actually use Twitter in any way as part of the presentation – when it came to Q&A, they used an open microphone in the session room.

The Future of Conferences

There’s been a lot of interest recently in Open Space meetings, Bar Camps, and other types of Unconference, where the audience takes a much larger role in the planning and delivery of conference materials. I suspect it’s going to be quite a long time before these take over from the more traditional conferences, at least enterprise software.

Both conferences included lots of real-time Twitter, and live video streaming. Attending conferences virtually becomes a real possibility – certainly compared to the hassle and expenses of actually being physically present. As Utku Can put it:

“Hello we’re the #leweb attendees. We’ve paid €1500 to sit together and check Twitter.”

Although, of course, it can never completely replace the real thing. As  Andy Bitterer put it:

“Attending an event virtually like this week’s #SAPsummit still not the same thing as being there. Miss the live interaction.”

I believe that in the future, more conferences will start to look like the SAP Summit, which is just part of a much longer ongoing dialog with a group of “stakeholders”, that also plays out through SAP’s Developer Network, and other regular meetings and communication, including platforms like Twitter.

Audiences are going to find it increasingly easy to get information before the event, and less patient with the rephrasing of messaging they’ve already heard before. The sessions are going to get more interactive. The audiences will want to ask more questions, earlier, and will expect their comments on Twitter or other channels to be included. Presenters will have to be more flexible, adapting their contents in real time to the audience.

Resources

• The PowerPoint twitter tools allow you to see live tweets embedded in your presentation, and let you “auto tweet” out your key points.

Another round of updates to the PowerPoint Twitter Tools, including:

• Auto-tweeting
• An additional feedback slide
• An option for secure internal use
• A customizable text-zooming tool
• The ability to set up values in advance (for example, to add the tools into a conference template)

To access all these tools, please go to the main download page: http://www.sapweb20.com/blog/powerpoint-twitter-tools/. Here’s some information about each of the new features:

PowerPoint AutoTweet

The PowerPoint AutoTweet functionality, available as a PowerPoint Add-in, lets you automatically update your twitter status during your presentation.

As you go through your slides in presentation mode, any text in your note pages between the tags [twitter] and [/twitter] will automatically be tweeted when you reach the appropriate slide.

The plugin uses Microsoft VBA (visual basic for applications), so is only supported in PowerPoint for Windows (the idea is based on similar functionality already available for Keynote on the Macintosh).

Checking the “Display success status of tweets” option will show a dialog box during the presentation, telling you whether the tweet was successful or not. It will close automatically after a second or so (the actual time may vary depending on the vagaries of Windows processing).

You can use the twitter feed to reinforce the points you are making in your presentation, or ask the audience questions related to your content, and include a feedback slide later in the presentation to review the audience replies.

New Feedback Slide

Here’s another feedback slide tool for high-tweet locations (web 2.0 conferences, etc.), showing twice as many tweets as the original. Like the original, it auto-refreshes every 30 seconds and supports pagination and custom feeds (for example using a service like http://TidyTweet.com for a moderated feed, or any other atom-based feed).

Secure Internal Use

What if you would like to use the PowerPoint Twitter Tools for an internal meeting, but don’t want to blast your critique of executive strategy over the internet?

One option is to use the open-source microblogging platform from Status.Net (motto: “Your life and your business are your own. Take control of your status.”). You can see an example of this product in action at www.identi.ca

To use the product, you’d need to install a server inside your organization, invite your employees to register, and then use a custom feed such as:

http://yourinternalserver:1088/api/statusnet/tags/timeline/thetagyouwanttofollow.atom

The two feedback slides and the ticker bar all support the use of custom feeds. Unfortunately, some of the status.net feeds don’t include the avatars link, so you only get the text updates using this method (e.g. see the screen shot below using the public feed for the “enterprise20” tag from identi.ca: http://identi.ca/api/statusnet/tags/timeline/enterprise20.atom).

Zoom Text Tool

This tool doesn’t connect directly to twitter just yet, but it’s a nice graphic effect that you can customize with your own words. Here’s a glimpse of what it looks like (this text moves towards the viewer, and you can click on values to move them to the center)

Support for Predefined Values and Templates

Do any of these apply to you?

• You’re tired of entering the same keyword values each time you open the presentation?
• You have a technically-challenged manager, and you need to set the values in advance?
• You’re scared that the audience might – gasp — see the mouse on the screen? (this is a surprisingly common fear among conference organizers)
• You’d like to set up a conference template for others to uses

The answer to all these is to use the setup variables, now supported by most of the tools. To set variables in advance, simple right-click the tool in PowerPoint and add them to the end of the movie name. Here’s a quick list of the variables available:

• “keyword=yoursearchterm” (use %20 instead of a space if you need two words)
• “locked=1” hides the bar for the search term, effectively “locking” it to whatever you’ve pre-set
• “votes=10” to set the maximum number of votes
• “customfeed=1” to enable a custom feed
• “customfeedurl=http://yourcustomfeedurl” to set the value of the custom feed
• “days=4” increases the number of days votes are valid for
• “percentageorvalue=1” to show percentage by default (0 to show value)
• “choice1=YourChoiceText” for the hover-over text on the voting charts (choice1 through choice6, as appropriate – and use %20 instead of a space if you need two words)

For example, if you wanted to set up the feedback slide so that it automatically opened with a search for the tag “#sap”, you can simply right-mouse click on the movie, and add “?keyword=#sap” to the end of the “Movie” Parameter (note that in theory you should use URLencoding of values, e.g. %23 instead of #, but it seems to work anyway)

And here’s an example of the text to add in order to get a locked-down, custom moderated feed:
“?locked=1&customfeed=1&customfeedurl=http://timoelliott.tidytweet.com/SAPWeb20.atom”

Here’s the result – note that the search term can no longer be changed:

To see which values are valid for which movies, click on the “embed” button, and view the options for the embedded HTML:

To access all these tools, please go to the main download page: http://www.sapweb20.com/blog/powerpoint-twitter-tools/

You can now sign up to be a beta participant of SAP’s 12sprints project, “a collaborative environment for people to make better decisions based on data” or a “people-connecting, data-sharing, decision-making tool that actually sets work in motion.”

Early versions of the prototype were glimpsed during demonstrations by Léo Apotheker and Ian Kimbell at SAP SAPPHIRE in Berlin last year, and by Marge Breya at SAP TechEd in Vienna, and the project is now letting people sign up for pre-beta access to the prototype.

Beta users will get access to a “virtual war room” with various types of decision-making tools available. According to the www.12sprints.com site:

“It’s not just a place where things get discussed. It’s where things get done. Invite the right people. Bring in the pertinent data. And choose the most informed course of action with the help of pre-defined, interactive decision-making tools. It’s all built in. Everything you need to get everyone on the same page — finally under one roof.”

Marge Breya recently repeated her SAP Tech Ed demo for Information Week’s Fritz Nelson, with a scenario based on people collaborating on go-to-market strategy after a new company has been acquired:

“…[it’s] about a purpose-driven experience, and the user gets to design it. So I can set up my own purpose whenever I want, invite the people I want, and get the exact data I want and expertise at my fingertips.”

Marge is invited to review the current decision goal, timeline, data etc.

Marge decides that she disagrees with the current plan, so enters a new negative opinion:

And uses another labs project called “Kona”, the next generation of on-demand business intelligence, to get the data she needs:

Here’s the full video:

And here’s Fritz’s commentary:

“We began with 12 Sprints, which I can best describe as a collaborative workspace, with a combination of project management and data sharing. You can pull in rich data feeds and share knowledge and make decisions, all in real time. In some ways, it resembles the modern Wiki. Where we explored other tools that help find and analyze data, 12 Sprints is where you would bring the most pertinent information back for team decision making.”

“Both 12 Sprints and Kona are cloud-based applications, run by SAP. Neither are available today, but both are expected to enter beta testing in November, with full release set for the first quarter (Kona) and first half (12 Sprints) of 2010.”

Business intelligence used to be called “decision support systems”, but the tools available have typically focused on gathering information, not the real-world collaboration required to turn that data into actual decisions and actions.

But that’s changing rapidly. According to Gartner:

“2009, Collaborative Decision Making will emerge as a new product category that combines social software with BI platform capabilities”

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can get news by following the 12sprints team on Twitter or by signing up to be one of the first to get exclusive access to the beta.

Not What You Might Think

No, SAP’s first official iPhone application is NOT the BusinessObjects Explorer iPhone Application that Marge Breya demonstrated during the keynote of SAP TechEd Vienna, and which Alexis Naibo of the SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center used to win the Demo Jam contest.

That application isn’t quite yet available on iTunes (but will be shortly). For more information about this forthcoming application, check out the demonstration video on Vimeo and Craig Cmehil interviewing Alexis in Vienna.

Stuck in Brisbane traffic? This App’s for You

The first official SAP iPhone application is already available on iTunes. So why haven’t you heard of it? Well, it’s unfortunately not much use to you unless you live in Brisbane, Australia.

But the free application, created by the folks in the SAP Research center who brought you the Google Wave / SAP “Gravity” prototype, is a wonderful example of what Web 2.0 technology can do in today’s increasingly wired world.

Here’s the blurb from the application’s page on iTunes that gives an overview of the application:

Stuck in traffic? An event at Suncorp Stadium clogging up William Jolly Bridge? An accident on Gympie Road? Wish you simply took the other way? BNE Traffic is here to help — life is too short to be stuck in traffic!

BNE Traffic is a research prototype created by SAP Research, the global technology research unit of SAP AG, acting as your personal crystal ball for the streets of Brisbane. Before heading out, make an informed choice of routes by viewing what others have already encountered — we leverage the information of hundreds of users. The application shows a map of the greater Brisbane area and displays information about current traffic conditions. Pins on the map allow you to easily recognize where obstacles have been identified. Based on the information associated with these pins, you can adjust your route accordingly and avoid traffic jams. With the help of BNE Traffic, you do not have to be late for that movie, important meeting, or dinner date again.

Features

• Displays traffic incidents around greater Brisbane graphically
• Leverages information from hundreds of users through the Twitter platform (#bnetraffic)
• Works in read-only mode and therefore does not transmit any of your private information
• Uses cutting-edge text analytics technology

And here’s a video that gives an overview of the application and the technology used: it extracts tweets tagged with “#bnetraffic”, then uses the SAP BusinessObjects Text Analysis technology to extract the geolocation information and place the information on the appropriate place in a Google map. And the whole thing is hosted using Amazon’s cloud technology. Interestingly, the researchers claim that the application took only three days to put together (but getting authorizations to put in on the iTunes store took another three months).

[Update] Check out the blog post on SDN, An Unconvential Use of SAP Text Analysis by Marek Kowalkiewicz of SAP Research describing the project.

And if you ARE in Brisbane, note that BNE Traffic isn’t the only SAP technology that’s helping you speed towards your favorite surfing spot. IBM and SAP worked together to provide a “motorway that thinks” for the Queensland Government:

…Queensland Motorways identified the toll plazas on the Gateway and Logan motorways as a major pinch point. The need to have vehicles either slow as they passed through the toll plazas using electronic tolling or to stop and pay with cash at a toll booth was significantly slowing the speed of traffic.

“Free-flow tolling was seen as beneficial for two reasons,” explains Phil Mumford. “First, if we could automate the tolling process and eliminate the need for drivers to stop, it would immediately increase the average speed of traffic flow, improve safety and the traveling experience of motorists. Secondly, the solution would allow us to digitally capture and analyze information about the vehicles that use our roads, which would help us make dramatic improvements to traffic management in the future.”

The roadside solution replaces the traditional toll booths with a Thales/Vitronic road-side gantry that utilizes video cameras and dedicated short-range communication technologies to capture information on passing vehicles. Vehicles are identified either by an in-vehicle tag or by analyzing footage of their number plates using two optical character recognition (OCR) engines, one at the roadside and a Dacolian engine at the central system.

The vehicle data is then matched to the appropriate customer account, and an IBM-developed rating engine assesses how much money is owed. The billing information is passed to back-end SAP ERP Financials and SAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications, which either deduct the total from a prepaid customer account, or generate an invoice. Business reporting is handled by SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse, and integration by SAP NetWeaver Process Integration.

“The whole process is automated and instantaneous, and there is no need for drivers to stop to pay their toll,” explains Phil Mumford. “Moreover, except in certain cases where a vehicle cannot be identified by OCR, there is no need for manual intervention by our staff. This not only improves traffic flow – it also cuts down the cost per transaction, which will help us offer better value to our customers.”

More importantly, the introduction of the SAP CRM application is leading to a fundamental change in the way Queensland Motorways interacts with its customers. Now it can see what vehicles are using the roads and how often and at what times they use the roads. In the future, Queensland Motorways will be able to tailor its services to individual drivers – with a profound effect on both customer experience and traffic management.

“With SAP CRM, we have achieved a better understanding of who our customers are,” says Phil Mumford. “In the future we’ll be able to offer customers useful information about the transport network. For example, a customer making regular trips to the airport on a Monday morning may want to receive congestion reports direct to their phones. The whole experience has the potential to be much more personalized.

“The idea is to have ‘a motorway that thinks’ – a more intelligent solution that will give our customers a better range of options for their journeys.”

Surfer photo by “d.i.”

The panelists were all members of the 2.0 Adoption Council (from left to right in the photo above) Greg Lowe of Alcatel-Lucent, Megan Murray of Booz Allen Hamilton, Bryce Williams of Eli-Lilley, Jamie Pappas of EMC, Bruce Galinsky of MetLife, and Claire Flanagan of CSC.

Here’s a resume of the panel’s responses to David’s questions (captured on the fly, so typically not verbatim quotes)

David: How has Enterprise 2.0 been transforming your organizations?

Greg: We’re in the process of changing from a waterfall organization to something more agile. But right now, we don’t have the processes and tools in place to support that. Our work in the enterprise 2.0 space is to break down the silos and let people come up with new ways of working, and reducing duplicate efforts.

David: But shouldn’t you have done this before anyway? What’s different?

Greg: It’s true that change agency is nothing new – but now we have tools and technologies to support these people. We’re a 70,000 person organization, and it’s now easier to find and work with other change agents.

Claire: These tools are making it easier to solve the business problems.

Bruce: At Met-Life, it’s an enabling set of technologies. It allows people to allow new things and work in different areas. We couldn’t do that before, we were pigeon-holed, and we couldn’t share what we were doing.

Claire: It’s not an incremental technology. I came from knowledge management, and you used to have to go to those tools. These new technologies are letting people do something directly in their workstream, which I think is much more important.

David: How does the technology transform the workforce? What does that even mean?

Megan: The workforce is already being transformed. We expect more as employees: more input, and more recognition, and we want to collaborate. That’s already happening — these technologies are just allowing us to do these things better, faster. As organizations, we’re trying to be as open and agile as possible about what these technologies can do.

David: Doesn’t a big cultural shift have to take place to use these tools?

Bryce: At Eli Lilley, we were interested in working more closely with our customers, using Web 2.0 technology, but there was a lot of trepidation and regulatory concerns. So we’re building our social competencies internally, using Enterprise 2.0 to lead to web 2.0 and more engagement with our customers.

David: Should it be top-down, or bottom-up?

Jamie: At EMC, we started bottom-up, with folks that wanted to start evangelism. But we also needed to find executive sponsors. One of the fallacies we see is that it’s a cure-all, fix-all type of transformation. It’s just an enabler, but you need advocates across the organization.

Bruce: It’s a tool like any other. We need to do our jobs quicker, and we can’t do that unless we’re collaborating more quickly.

David: How does it relate to business process?

Claire: I think it’s about business process and the changing nature of our workforce. We have lots of people who are working in home offices and client offices across the globe. It’s hard for them to get the answers they need. These tools are like a virtual office for them. The technology is an enabler for collapsing time-zone and distance problems.

David: How does it relate to people?

Megan: Regardless of the technology, there’s always people involved. The wide variety of tools we have can be used smartly – surveys instead of somebody hosting a forum, etc.

David: Does E2.0 bring anything other than community? Have we hit the wall?

Megan: I think it’s baby steps. Compared to 2006, it’s leaps and bounds. Many more opportunities now.

David: What about governance and compliance?

Bryce: We can’t not do it – we’re such a group of ambitious knowledge workers. There are some employees who say “I can do this in the external world, and I’m creative, so I’m going to find a way to do it”. The danger is that company data goes outside the fire wall. We need to herd the cats and help provide people with the right tools.

David: It’s about opening things up, but that works against governance, lots of information has to remain private – how do you handle that?

Megan: We’re working on participatory governance. We have all the basic stuff in place. But in addition to that, we’re talking about getting participation from the groups that have skin in the game. So if we have an HR problem, there’s an HR community that can handle it.

Jamie: I think organizations have to stop not trusting their employees. You can take two approaches – you can lock everything down, or we can say “your responsible people, here are the policies”, and approach things as they happen.

Bruce: If people are malicious, they will do something no matter what. We should watch and look.

David: But there’s a real material risk!

Bruce and Jamie: But there is that same risk right now…

David: But the tools make it easier, harder to lock down…

Jamie: People have common sense, they really do.

Megan: It’s about accountability and visibility. “I can’t stop you from being stupid, but I can highlight it when you are stupid.’” There’s a lot of power in empowering people.

David: What about technology “religious wars?”

Jamie: It’s not about the technology, it’s about the people. We use the 80/20 rule – is it intuitive and easy to use? If so, we can springboard off of that.

Greg: The European view very different from the US view. They’re ahead in open source. That kind of creates a different market.

David: But this isn’t new?

Greg: No, but the conversations are a lot more open now.

Megan: There’s a generational bias. Some people are naturally “revolutionary”, and scare the people in charge – and we get caught in the crossfire.

Bruce: We have some areas that use Microsoft, some that use IBM, and some areas that are going to do their own thing no matter what. If there happen to be two tools, oh well – there are certain things you can fight, and other things you can’t.

David: What about ROI?

Greg: How do you tie better collaboration to the bottom line? We can save time finding answers, etc. and you can do some correlation, and that’s your cost savings or productivity increase.

Megan: We use one story: we had many huge email threads, with everybody on copy. Somebody took the longest thread, put in some values for how long it would take to pay attention to each email compared to a wiki, etc. and worked out that it “cost” up to $250,000… And if something as small and insignificant as a “reply all” can have a big dollar amount, what about the big stuff?

Audience question: I think one of the opportunities is “better decisions”. They can be made in lots of different ways — through consensus, etc. and this technology can help do it better – any thoughts?

Jamie: We’ve been doing some cost-cutting at EMC, and that’s always very painful if it’s top-down. So our management asked “what would you do?”. We had lots of suggestions: sensors in conference rooms, changes to cell phone policies, etc. And when these things come from employee suggestions, people are a lot more vested. And we’ve had other changes that weren’t popular, but now there’s at least a forum for people to communicate their reactions. In some cases, the executives have said “yes, that was a bad move, next time we’re going to do it differently” – and that’s very empowering.

David: Within TechWeb, we had a public conversation about how to improve our virtual events. We have tons of groups running their own events. We’ve been able to prevent the wrong decisions – repeating the mistakes that others have already made.

Audience question – You’re clearly not IT people — you’re too enlightened! I think Enterprise 2.0 has its roots in the new interfaces of Web 2.0. I know lots of “real” IT people would say the interface is not the important part, it’s the underlying systems. How important is user interface, do you think?

Bryce: The power comes from the critical mass of participation, and if what we’re trying to do is in lots of different locations, or hard to use, people just go back to their overflowing inbox. So yes, the user interface is very important.

Claire: I think you hit on something very important. If you don’t select the right tool, something that’s easy to get started with, the users are going to vote with their feet and do something else. Our job, when we look at these tools, is to keep this in mind. There are lots of factors: technical, compliance, cost factors, but usability is very important. One of the things we wanted to try in our pilot was whether or not the technology was “addictive”

David: So should the users help choose?

Megan: We’re using a scrum methodology, and we’re actively involving the users, so yes!

Bruce: We have an innovation center, and the employees help us make the deployments better. We started with the IT department, in fact.

Greg: It’s a little like having an internet startup. You need to engage people, make it “sticky”

Claire: We started with a wiki a few years ago. It was a great first step, but people had to use wiki notation, etc – so this actually became a barrier to full-scale collaboration. So we wanted something that made this easier. We could only get so far with the previous tool, because it was too hard to use.

Jamie: It’s not about “IT push”. It has to have the users invested in it.

Question from audience: You said managers have to trust employees more – any practical suggestions on how to do this?

Jamie: We deliberately didn’t “over engineer” – we opened things up internally, and nothing bad has happened, no users or content had needed to be removed. We tend to assume that you have to lock it down before bad things happen. But you can educate instead of prohibit.

Bruce: And you get more trust if you show trust

Bryce: There was lots of talk about different approaches to this at the beginning. One person ended up setting up his own microblogging platform on a server under his desk, and had thousands of users. It made it’s own business case, and he’s been able to show that there was no problem with content.

David: Web 2.0  is also about machine interfaces, mash-ups etc. Are you seeing that?

Megan: In our environment, not a lot, yet. All the information we use coming from our systems.

Question from the audience: Referring to the original article that generated this discussion, I think the author wasn’t impressed with the soft process improvements. His point was that at a macro business level, they’re just incremental. Can I take up his question: Is anyone able to share any real hard business process changes? product development, innovation, etc?

Claire: As a consulting organization, we’ve been able to document how our proposal processes have changed, to find experts and close deals much faster.

Jamie: Our competitive group has adopted our tool as the one place that they communicate everything, so that has transformed how our sales force gets information – that’s the first place they go now. Also, we have an annual innovation conference, and we’ve been able to open up submissions to the whole organization, which has been a huge win, both for content and engagement.

Bruce: We have to create an IT factbook on a regular basis, and it was a painful manual process. Now we have a wiki and letting the relevant people fill it out.

Claire: We have a group set up for excel tips and tricks – and this was very successful, an incredible network of people, and that translates into an everyday process. When you think about hard dollars, they’re there.

Megan: It’s speed to resolution. We’re expanding, and we want to become a more dispersed company, and we need the tools to support that.

Other articles:

• http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2009/11/is-enterprise-20-a-crock.php