Based on a blog post and proof-of-concept application earlier this year, I have been championing a SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center project to build an “augmented corporate reality” prototype.

The idea stemmed from one of the key themes of my BI future directions presentations: that for the first time in centuries, new technology comes from the consumer world, not from governments and businesses, and so we need to adapt and adopt these technologies for corporate use.

The mobile telephone is starting to become a “universal pointing device”: using the phone’s GPS location and compass, it knows where you are, and what you’re looking at. There is now a wide range of augmented reality mobile applications available on the market that help people find the nearest pizzeria, get information about a monument, or locate local twitter users.

How could this functionality be used in the business world? My first proof-of-concept blog post imagined examples of a manager getting information about a particular retail operation, a factory foreman getting maintenance records of machinery, and comparing sales between two different areas of a retail store.

These examples spurred a lot of conversations with customers around the globe about possible applications:

• An oil company interested in getting information about equipment in refineries
• A car manufacturer interested in providing information to managers of sales dealerships
• A consumer goods company interested in tracking information and location of their vending machines

Based on those conversations, we have been able to validate the core concepts and refined the functionality of our prototype. The result is an iPhone / iPad application that works closely with the SAP BusinessObjects Explorer technology and the BI onDemand web site.

Before I tell you more about it, let me emphasize: it’s a prototype, not a product. The SAP BusinessObjects innovation center is modeled on Google Labs. We’re taking a transparent, Web 2.0 approach to innovation. Rather than working for years in some dark room and then unveiling a completed product, the team creates iterative prototypes and make them freely available for download, so that you can test them, use them, and give us feedback. They’re free, but not supported, and we give no guarantees that they will be developed further. The idea is that not-so-good ideas sink without wasted development, while good ideas get refined before turning into real products (our track record is very good: mobile BI, the Explorer product, and many features of the current BusinessObjects platform all started off as prototypes).

And please note that everything I mention below may change over time, based on your feedback. We are in the process of refining the prototype, and hope to make it available for you to download and use in the next few weeks or months.

How it works

You upload a data set that includes Point of Interest (POI) information to the BusinessObjects OnDemand platform at bi.ondemand.com (you can sign up for a free account), set some data configuration options, then access that data set from your iPhone or iPad. The prototype works out what information to display based on your location and the phone’s compass heading:

The prototype uses five fields of information to define the “points of interest” (POIs) that can be viewed: latitude, longitude, name, an associated image, and at least one data value.

Demonstration Screen Shots

First we install the Augmented Reality Explorer application (currently, this involves a specific build for identified devices – we will make it a free download from the Apple App Store as soon as we can). We then open up the application on the iPhone, and log into a BI OnDemand account:

We choose an appropriately-configured data source. The points of interest are then automatically displayed based on your location: you can choose to see either the closest POI first, or the one closest to the direction you are pointing your phone. The icons are configurable — in this case, I’m using them to indicate the current state of sales: the arrow indicates whether current sales are larger than the previous period, and the color indicates whether the current sales are above, equal to, or below the current sales targets.

We can choose to display the points on a map, and zoom in to get more detail by tapping on the radar to make it full screen, and sliding a finger to choose the radius of distance we’re interested in:

I can also view the points of interest superimposed on the real world, using the iPhone’s camera – as I move around, each POI seems to hover over its physical location, and I can choose what information is displayed as each point is selected:

At any time, I can choose to filter the points by any of the dimensions available in the data set, and clicking on a POI takes me through to the same interface as the BusinessObjects Explorer application. Any filters that are applied in the augmented reality view are applied to the Explorer view, and vice-versa, so I can easily and simply explore the information available (and it could be many millions of rows of data, if you’re using SAP BusinessObjects Explorer Accelerated)

And the prototype looks great on the iPad, too (the camera view is not available, obviously):

Other thoughts:

• The possible uses are currently limited by the precision of the location services of the iPhone/iPad (GPS, cell tower triangulation, wifi triangulation). It works very well outdoors with GPS, but using cell-towers only tells you where you are within a few blocks (which is good enough to locate the nearest retail branch, but not for comparing one aisle of a supermarket with another). Various companies such as SkyHook and Cisco are working on increasing the available precision.
• The Augmented Explorer prototype can also directly access a corporate Explorer server, with an appropriately formatted data set
• The BusinessObjects data quality solutions include location coordinates for just about any address in the world. In an ideal world, you’d be able to submit a file with addresses, and we’d turn it into coordinates on the fly, and that’s something we’ll be looking into in the future. In the meantime, there are other free solutions out there.
• Note that the locations that you’re looking at don’t have to be static: imagine pointing your device to get information about cars, trucks, or people (e.g. combining it with information from the Social Network Analyzer prototype). In the short term, data latency getting information into Explorer would be an issue, but better BI on event information will improve this area, too…

Next steps:

If you have an questions, comments, or feedback, or feel like you have a good case for getting a copy of the application even before we post it to the App Store (e.g. you’re an SAP employee with a customer who might be interested), feel free to contact me or the SAP BusinessObjects innovation center team directly. We’re particularly interested in finding real-world scenarios for this (it’s not about doing something just for the sake of the technology).

Early press coverage:

• SAP working on augmented reality for business, Jennifer Scott, IT Pro, July 8, 2010
• Q&A: Timo Elliott, BI evangelist at SAP, Jennifer Scott, IT Pro, July 9, 2010
• SAP working on augmented reality for business, TechCentral (Ireland), July 12, 2010
• SAP working on augmented reality for business, Leo King (Computerworld UK), Network World, July 9, 2010

Evernote is a great Web 2.0 application that is focused on “helping the world remember everything”. It lets you grab information on the fly, such as notes, web pages links, photos, etc. from a variety of different devices (PC, Blackberry, etc.) and let you store them in your Evernote account. Everything you upload is automatically processed, indexed, and made searchable (for example, if you take a picture of some text, Evernote automatically uses text recognition and makes the text searchable). And you can add tags or organize notes into different notebooks.

The Evernote API allows other applications to integrate with the Evernote platform. This was used by the SAP StreamWork team to allow you to bring information from your Evernote account into a StreamWork activity

Now Evernote has launched the Evernote “Trunk” of applications that extend and connect to the “Evernote memory platform”. SAP Streamwork is the first application featured on the new site.

Evernote have put together a blog posting on how to use the two applications together, and there’s a StreamWork tutorial video available:

Press coverage:

• Evernote Launches Trunk Productivity App Platform, Fritz Nelson, InformationWeek
• Evernote Trunk To Add Hundreds of Apps and Features, Robert Strohmeyer, PC World
• Evernote Launches ‘The Trunk’ to Showcase Integrations Built on the Evernote Platform, TMCNet
• Evernote Turns Itself into a Platform with “Trunk”, Liz Gannes, GigaOm
• Evernote, the Startup that Augments your Memory, Launches an App Store, Kim-Mai Cutler, VentureBeat

Here’s a short video that gives a quick, irreverent overview of the brand-new cloud-based, software-as-a-service ERP offering from SAP.

It’s now official: SAP has released its brand-new Web 2.0 product called StreamWork. The project was initially called “Constellation” within SAP, and was first exposed to beta customers on the web site 12sprints.com, as covered in earlier postings on this site.

Why the name? It’s a variant on “workstream”, which according to Wikipedia is:

“A flow of output, the activities and transactions, that a worker produces as they go about their daily work activities. Workstreams are flows of largely unstructured data that workstreaming technologies seek to capture, document and repackage in more intelligent ways benefiting individual workers, managers and corporations.”

And the article goes on to say:

“…tapping into and mining these workstreams presents tremendous opportunities to companies in terms of collaboration, agility and collective intelligence.”

Other research seems to back this up. According to a study by Frost & Sullivan, 36% of company performance is determined by organizations’ “collaborative index”:

“This is more than twice the impact of a company’s strategic orientation (16%) and more than five times the impact of market and technological turbulence influences (7%). This is a key finding because it empirically demonstrates that increased high-quality collaboration can improve business performance.“

The Power of Collaborative Decisions

Every person in every organization makes many decisions every day. Many of these are so small that we don’t even recognize them as decisions. Every time a sales person calls a customer, she is “deciding” to prioritizing that activity over everything else she could be doing. Of course, a sub-optimal decision may not make much difference. But over time, and across a large organization, these small decisions pile up and have a huge influence to corporate performance.

Of course, computer systems have been promising Improved business decision-making since at least the 1950s, by providing more information about company operations. And they have largely delivered, enabling corporations of breath-taking complexity. But you can give everybody the same facts, and still end up with completely different views about what the data means, and what should be done about it (just look at any group of rival politicians!).

Decision-making is a core business function of every organization, and has been extensively studied by scientists and management theorists. But despite all the advances in theory, real-life decision-making is still dominated by people, personalities, and endless emails and meetings.

Decisions still tend to be made in messy, non-repeatable, “are-we-really-sure-about-this?” ways, relying heavily on “gut feel”. People often spend more time and effort making decisions as they do on actually trying to execute them, and reviewing / reversing decisions that have already been made (every new politician and executive feels honor-bound to reverse the decisions of their predecessors).

Collaboration or “Enterprise 2.0” platforms, including Jive and Cubetree and Google Wave have helped, by letting employees work together on projects, but they typically don’t directly support goal-oriented decision-making.

Introducing SAP StreamWork

StreamWork helps you bring together:

• All the right people needed to make a good decision (executives, influencers, experts), across different corporate functions and geographies
• All the information relevant to the decision, from inside or outside the organization, both qualitative and quantitative, objective and subjective (and reformat it, if necessary). Integration with Evernote and Scribd makes it easy to upload and share documents.
• All the right methods that should be brought to bear in order to consider all the aspects of the decision (cost/benefit analysis, SWOT analysis, Pro/Con charts, responsibility matrices, etc.)

See this link for a summary of StreamWork features and view the StreamWork YouTube Channel for an extensive set of how-to videos.

By putting all this in one environment, and letting people collaborate and comment and add data and add documents, and explain their reasoning, organizations get:

• More clarity about why decisions are being made
• More engagement from employees, who can see a direct link between their suggestions and the final result
• More commitment to decisions (research shows that we care more about fair process than we do with final decisions. If we feel our voice has been heard, we’re far more likely to comply with the final choice, even if we didn’t agree with it)
• Better results. Measurement and tracking of the decision-making process, allowing you to optimize the process over time (faster decision cycles, better outcomes)

On-Demand, Extensible Architecture

StreamWork uses an on-demand architecture, so you can be productive immediately without any software installs, and you can easily invite people from inside or outside the organization without having to worry about access problems. And it provides an open REST API, making it easy to extend StreamWork functionality and integrate with other systems.

Here’s a look at some of the add-ons that have already been built, including integration with InfoView, Text-to-query, Android, YouTube, and others.

Here’s a great example of the integration possibilities from OffiSync:

And SAP is busy integrating other prototypes such as Gravity, covered in an earlier post, with StreamWork.

Pricing

The basic edition is free, with up to five activities, 250Mb of storage, and the unlimited ability to collaborate in others’ activities. The Professional Edition costs $9/month for up to 100 activities, 5Gb of storage, and more control over user security. An Enterprise Edition is in the works, with more details to be announced later this year.

Sign up Now!

Signing up for StreamWork is easy and free — click here.

Other Coverage and Links

• Alex Williams, ReadWriteWeb: Does StreamWork Give a Picture of SAP’s Future?
• Bob Thompson, Customer Think: Will StreamWork get SAP out of its Innovation Funk?
• Chris Kanaracus, IDG News: SAP’s ‘Virtual War Room’ Tool Gets a Name: StreamWork
• Jon Brodkin, Network World: SAP Targets Online Collaboration Market with StreamWork
• Larry Barrett, Datamation: SAP Debuts Cloud-Based Collaboration Apps
• Xavier Lanier, GottaBeMobile.com: Evernote’s Incorporated in SAP Collaboration Tool
• B-Eye-Network: Formerly Known as 12sprints, SAP StreamWork is now Generally Available
• Rich Hoeg: 12Sprints Tutorial

I believe SAP is an under-appreciated leader in the Web 2.0 space, and this blog attempts to explain why. First, I should first point out that there are three distinct categories you can talk about SAP interacting with Web 2.0 technology:

• Web 2.0 by SAP – Web 2.0 products and services SAP provides to customers
• Web 2.0 with SAP – how SAP uses Web 2.0 techniques to interact with our customers and partners
• Web 2.0 at SAP – how SAP uses Web 2.0 technology within SAP

Let’s look at each of these in turn:

Web 2.0 by SAP

The term Web 2.0 means different things to different people, but generally people use it to encompass one or more of the following categories:

Easy, Powerful Interfaces

Web 2.0 products have simple, interactive, attractive, and intuitive interfaces that let people access information and carry out tasks without training.

SAP is a strong believer in design thinking across all aspects of the product solutions. Technology examples include:

• SAP BusinessObjects Explorer Accelerated, that lets you browse through billions of rows of corporate data as easily as you browse the web, using innovative memory-resident analytics coupled with an interface that automatically proposes appropriate analyses.
• SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius, providing attractive, interactive dashboards that can be seamlessly integrated into everyday business activities. For example, a presenter can show the effect of changes to forecasted variables in real time, directly within a PowerPoint presentation.

On-Demand, Mobile, and Cloud Computing

Web 2.0 applications are available on-demand, with a variety of different devices, with an internet-based platform that scales smoothly as demand grows.

SAP has a clear on-demand and cloud strategy:

• John Wookey and Peter Lorenz have outlined a clear on-demand strategy
• SAP Business ByDesign is now achieving wide recognition as a well-designed, flexible, on-demand business application, and its intuitive user interface now enables users to customize their own KPI dashboards and integrate third-party Web services such as GoYellow, Google Maps, or Map24.
• The SAP BusinessObjects on-demand platform has long been the clear leader in business intelligence as a service, letting organizations cleanse, store, analyze and share information effectively without having to install any hardware or software.
• SAP partners provide on-demand extensions to existing in-house functionality.

Collaboration

Web 2.0 tools let people work together to achieve common goals, frequently crossing traditional fault lines such as country, culture, or company boundaries.

SAP believes that collaboration tools should be aligned with business process. Example of technology include:

• The SAP Netweaver Portal provides discussion forums, lets users comment on, rank, and tag content, and integrate SAP content seamlessly into other platforms such as Microsoft Sharepoint.
• Collaboration can be analyzed and optimized, like any other business activity. Jive software, the leading independent vendor of Enterprise 2.0 solutions, provides SAP BusinessObjects’ on-demand analytics as an integrated part of their product offer.
• Data from SAP systems can be used to augment conversations on platforms such as Google Wave.
• The SAP Gravity prototype lets users of Google Wave bring together technical and business experts to collaborate on business process
• The new SAP BusinessObjects 12sprints prototype supports directed, collaborative decision-making.

Social Networking

Web 2.0 tools let people make connections and share status updates.

SAP gives organizations the tools they need to monitor and optimize social networking inside and outside organizations.

• SAP’s text analytics provide organizations with the ability to do “sentiment analysis” across social media, and automatically integrate
• SAP’s CRM solutions provide a seamless customer experience across networking platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
• The Social Network Analyzer prototype lets organizations bring together and analyze the relationships that are created between employees, and between the company and its customers. It makes it easy to mine the the wealth of data stored in existing corporate systems, such as the organizational hierarchy from a human capital management system, informal organizational information stored in email distribution lists and project systems, the sales relationships from the customer relationship management system, inquiries made through the support platform or web site, etc.
• Twitter is fast becoming a platform for crowd-sourced data gathering. SAP prototypes allow people to avoid traffic in Australia and make presentations an interactive, collaborative experience by showing the “backchannel” twitter feed directly within the presenter’s slides, and allowing voting via twitter.

Mashups

Web 2.0 tools are open and easily integrated with other solutions.

SAP is the clear leader in real-life business process, and realizes that it’s essential to bridge systems and combine information from multiple sources

• SAP is a leading proponent of services-oriented architectures, that allow organizations to easily and seamless provide an end-to-end business process across multiple different application architectures.
• For individuals, the SAP rooftop marketplace prototype lets business people easily integrate information from multiple different sources and applications using open interfaces.

Web 2.0 with SAP

SAP Community Network

The SAP community network site (SCN) is rated as the best in the industry. It gives the SAP ecosystem of customers, partners, solution providers and employees a platform to share questions and expertise. A wide range of different business, solution, and technical areas are covered, and it is . A full set of Web 2.0 tools are provided for members, including discussion forums, blogs (over 5,000 contributors, of whom only 30% work for SAP), e-learning, wikis, and reputation and recognition programs, and there are tight links with other platforms such as LinkedIn and other social forums.

The site has dedicated spaces for the developer network, the business process expert (BPX) community, a Business Objects community, a university alliance community, a community career center, an interactive documentation space called docupedia, an Innocentive innovation challenge program, EcoHub, a community-driven online marketplace, and a soon-to-be-launched code exchange area.

SCN has over 2 million members, who post around 6,000 messages a day in over 200 different discussion forums, and over 250 blog posts each month. People from 229 countries and territories visited the site over 28 million times in 2009, and viewed over 200 million pages.

The growing involvement in these communities helps SAP get closer to customers, partners and stakeholders for product and service innovation. For example, SAP product marketing managers use the BPX community to share product information and best practices for product use and get product feedback. And SAP customers share their own best practices with their peers and get unbiased advice.

SAP’s Community Workspace platform provides customers and employees with the ability to set up invitation-only collaboration forums to discuss common interests, such as “business process in the Oil and Gas Industry”. Over 60,000 people from over 2,000 different customers participate in over 3,500 different forums, visiting the site more than 260,000 times each month.

SAP Influencer Program

SAP provides what many consider the gold standard program for industry analysts, journalists, and bloggers. The program involves regular meetings and virtual events, and a hosted platform for quick answers to questions. It is famous for providing exceptionally open access to senior executives, company directions, and product plans, and for openly accepting and integrating regular critics of the company.

SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center

SAP is taking an increasingly Web 2.0 approach to innovation. Modeled on the Google Labs, the SAP BusinessObjects innovation center lets customers trial early prototypes and give feedback, long before traditional product development lifecycles. The center receives thousands of pieces of feedback each week that are used to adapt and improve products.

Web 2.0 at SAP

All SAP employees have access to full collection of Web 2.0 tools through the internal corporate portal, including blogging, wikis, discussion forums, collaboration areas, and microblogging.

SAP was one of the earliest members of the 2.0 Adoption Council, a group dedicated to collecting and sharing best practice use of Web 2.0 to improve employee productivity and collaboration. Employees are encouraged to participate in external social media, and have been provided with a clear set of social media guidelines.

SAP and Web 2.0

In the end, it’s all about bringing together the best of SAP and the best of Web 2.0

For more information about any of these topics, please browse the other posts on this blog.

[UPDATE: See this post for the soon-to-be released prototype from the SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center]

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.