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

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

[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

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.”