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

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

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.

We’re used to seeing IT industry megavendors such as SAP augment their solutions with web 2.0 technology from smaller vendors, but now one of the leading enterprise 2.0 companies is turning to SAP for a cloud computing offers to extend new capabilities to customers.

At the Enterprise 2.0 2009 event in Boston, Jive and SAP announced that Jive is going to be a reseller of SAP’s on-demand BI solutions, providing “social BI” to their customers.

SAP has long been a customer of Jive Software’s Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform, notably to power the forums on the SAP Development Network, and SAP’s Collaboration Workspace, and a few years ago SAP signed an OEM agreement to include Jive Forums as a standard part of the SAP NetWeaver portal application.

This announcement is a clear sign of the growing maturity of the enterprise 2.0 market, in two different ways.

First, it’s the first concrete results of SAP’s increased focus on the web 2.0 market, and in particular the investment in the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio of products, designed to transform the work of “business users” in the same way that ERP has transformed operational processes.

SAP BusinessObjects was one of the early pioneers in the on-demand business intelligence market, with a flexible platform that provides the best of both worlds: customers can use the same technology platform in a mix of on-demand or on-premise configurations, and move smoothly between the two. SAP’s agreement to partner with Jive is non-exclusive: the on-demand BI software is already used within other partner solutions including Oco.

Second, it shows that enterprise 2.0 solutions are real, and providing value in organizations. Jive’s 3,000 customers include many large organizations, that have been gathering valuable data about how companies collaborate internally and engage with customers and partners externally. As with any successful business process, they now want to examine and optimize that process, and mine that data with best-of-breed business intelligence tools.

These two trends were echoed by Susan Scrupski of ITSInsider, in her post And They’re Off. A Postcard From Enterprise 2.0 Event:

“This new venture, however, marks a clear initiative by SAP to (finally) take social software seriously, and likewise, it provides a grownup capability for a social software platform like Jive to deliver some clear business benefit.”

I believe business intelligence is an essential part of any successful enterprise 2.0 initiative, in order to:

Provide statistics on usage trends. Business intelligence helps proactively identify any technical or social roadblocks to effective deployment of collaboration tools, answering questions such as:

• When are the peaks and troughs of user activity? What causes them?
• Who has access to the system but is not using it?
• Which users have recently stopped using the system? Do they share any common characteristics?
• Are there any regular occasions where particular groups don’t use the system? Why?

Prove the ROI. Business intelligence functionality will help provide the data required to prove to skeptics of the value of collaboration and social computing inside organizations.

• Are users of the system more likely to get better (or worse) employee evaluations or bonuses?
• What’s the correlation between any groups of identified “top performers” and system usage?
• Do sales people who use the system achieve quota faster than sales people that do not?
• Does using the system replace other types of internal information dissemination, such as attending internal web seminars, or does it complement it?
• Is there any correlation between system use and employee or customer satisfaction?
• Are customers that engage in collaboration more or less profitable?

Optimize social relationships. If enterprise 2.0 software generates return on investment, it follows that it makes sense to try and optimize its use. Business intelligence systems can help decide where the network of relationships between employees, customers, and partners can be improved:

• Are there certain key “connectors” that provide a valuable service, but are not being recognized as such within the organization?
• Are there any groups of people that collaborate among themselves, but not with the rest of the organization? (e.g. bosses that frown on “their team” working with other departments)
• Do similar groups (such as regional sales offices) have different patterns of relationships? Why?
• Are there people that seem to be a negative influence on relationships within the organization? (e.g. detecting “bad bosses”
• Did the new bonus or incentive system we just introduced stop people collaborating?

Analyzing sentiments. Collaboration technology generates a lot of textual information that can be analyzed using technology such as SAP BusinessObjects’ Text Analytics, for analyzing the sentiment of customers, partners, and employees, about products, processes, or the collaboration system itself.

Note that in every case, it’s not enough to have information just from the collaboration system – it must be combined with information from other key financial and HR systems in order to get a full view of what is happening. This means that organizations must have a strategic approach to implementing business intelligence across the organization.

You can download Jive Software’s “Social Business Imperative Manifesto” here. And any organizations interested in trying out the SAP BusinessObjects ondemand solutions can click here to sign up for a Starter edition account.

Links and Other Analysis

Mary Hayes Weier of Information Week: Enterprise 2.0: SAP, Jive Combining BI With Wikis

Chris Kanaracus of IDG News Service: Jive, SAP Partner on ‘social BI’

Alex Goldman, InternetNews.com, SAP BusinessObjects integrates into Jive

Barb Mosher, CMS Wire, Jive Integrates SAP’s onDemand Business Intelligence Offerings

Oliver Marks, ZDNet Blogs: Jive & Telligent Get More Analytical

Susan Scrupski,  ITSInsider: And They’re Off. A Postcard From Enterprise 2.0 Event

There’s increasing awareness that collaboration with customers, partners, and other experts is essential in order to build the right products in the future. To do this, SAP has built a community ecosystem for innovation. In addition to the community sites for individuals to share information about industry expertise, business processes, SAP development, and SAP BusinessObjects, there are two technology lab organizations dedicated to getting input from the community around new SAP products and directions: the SAP BusinessObjects Labs, and the SAP Co-Innovation Labs.

SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center

The SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center, modeled after the Google Labs, showcases new software prototypes based on concepts and ideas from customers, partners, and internal teams. Anybody is free to download and try them, but they are not supported for production environments. Feedback is encouraged, and used to improve the products and decide which are commercialized. Lab “graduates” that have been commercialized include Mobile BI, Information on Demand, Polestar, and BI Widgets. In addition, the Lab works with academics in both US and Europe to constantly push forward the limits of productive information use.

The Innovation Center is not only about taking a Web 2.0 approach to innovation — many of the prototypes themselves have a distinctly Web 2.0 flavor. I have listed several of the most exciting projects below.

The Xcelsius Web 2.0 add-ons allow Xcelsius users to incorporate tag clouds and interactive relationship charts into dashboards (these are working Xcelsius models – move the slider, or click on the members of the network).

Polestar in the cloud is a hosted version of the commercially-available SAP BusinessObjects Polestar product that lets you try out the intuitive Polestar interface with your own Excel spreadsheets. Simply upload a simple Excel file with a header row and columns of data and then start slicing and dice information.

Comment it lets users of the SAP BusinessObjects intelligence platform comment on reports, adding them to a new transparent layer — users can not only share reporting and analytic information but also their feedback and discussions.

Catalog Browser for the iPhone lets you remotely access your favorite BusinessObjects content from the Apple iPhone. You can easily browse, search and display the Crystal Reports, Web Intelligence and Desktop Intelligence documents, and maintain a list of favorite documents.

The Text to Query prototype appears to perform magic, using the information already stored in BusinessObjects metadata. As you create a PowerPoint presentation or email, Text to Query can examine the text, spot keywords, and automatically offer chart suggestions (containing real enterprise data) that can augment. As you write about the revenue rising in a particular region, the prototype automatically brings up the revenue chart for that area.

The BISense prototype is similar – it makes it easy to integrate relevant BI content automatically into web pages. So if you have an internal web site where information is organized by product, for example, you can have a list of relevant reports display automatically for each product.

The Content Rating prototype lets people rate and share their opinions on published BI content in a collaborative manner, and can be used to “validate” reports as they go into production use.

 
Data Feed as a Universe lets users of SAP BusinessObjects WebIntelligence combine any information from RSS feeds and Web Services with corporate data from your operational systems and data warehouses (as well as CSV and Excel files).

Business Objects Masher lets developers create “templates” that can be used to create enterprise mashups that combine corporate data with web application resources like Yahoo! Maps, Google Maps or other types of visualization.

Other links for the BusinessObjects Innovation Center

• Subscribe to Business Objects Labs RSS feed 
• Give feedback to the labs team 
• View a presentation about the labs
• Presentation download

SAP Co-Innovation Lab

Zia Yusuf and Henning Kagermann open the Co-Innovation Lab

In June 2007, SAP launched the Co-Innovation Lab in Palo Alto, California, in order to foster greater collaborative innovation with customers and partners.

The lab features a simulated, heterogeneous data center, with hardware and infrastructure software from different vendors, including HP, Cisco, Intel, VMware, and Citrix. The lab provides a testing ground for new business solutions and technologies — lab members can quickly configure the data center in any number of ways in order to accurately replicate real-world challenges.

The lab provides a place for cooperation between different partners, along with SAP subject-matter expertise, training rooms, briefing center, and innovation documentation created with ecosystem partners and customers. In particular, the labs have collected and shared expertise on the virtualization of SAP installations – an important step in the cloud-hosted future.

Like most communities in the SAP ecosystem, the lab makes extensive use of virtual collaboration, leveraging Web 2.0 tools like Wikis, blogs, team spaces, and Webinars. For example, as part of the labs initiative, a Community Advisory Group was created with the charter to “Enable customers to embrace enterprise SOA while honoring their existing SOA investments and create a mutual understanding of Partners and SAPs approach to SOA”

Other Co-Innovation Lab Links

• SAP Co-Innovation Lab Solution Brief  
• How to get involved with the lab
• SAP Communities of Innovation: Co-Innovation Lab

SAP recently announced its sustainability strategy, including aggressive carbon reduction targets, a new cross-functional sustainability organization, and sustainability solutions for customers. More information is available on SAP’s sustainability pages.

What is Sustainability, Anyway?

Sustainability means different things to different people — the UN Commission on Sustainable Development lists over 40 issues that it can cover, including such topics as “sustainable tourism”, “poverty”, and “mountains”. Given this distinct lack of consensus over what sustainability means, it’s perhaps unsurprising that most organizations are still figuring out what sustainability means for their business and how to implement it.

Research published last year by the Economist Intelligence Unit provides a thorough review of organizations’ sustainability initiatives today – and the extent companies are having difficulty devising useful targets and aligning social and environmental objectives with financial ones. (Additional summaries of the Economist data for North America and Western Europe are available).

There’s a broad consensus that sustainability covers a “triple bottom line” that encompasses social, environmental, and economic dimensions. SAP defines it as “holistically managing economic, social and environmental risks and opportunities for increased profitability”:

• Promoting safety, health, and well-being of people
• Positively impacting the planet via environmental improvements
• Providing benefits for customers, communities and other stakeholders

Sustainability Benefits

Sustainability is rapidly become a business necessity: expected by consumers, enforced by new regulations, and encouraged by economic incentives.

According to the Economist survey, most executives (57%) believe that the benefits of pursuing sustainable practices outweigh the costs, and expect better environmental practices to attract new customers, improve products, and increase profitability.

Sustainability is More Important Than Ever

A more recent Economist Intelligence Unit survey also showed that far from slowing movement towards more sustainability, the current economic turbulence is accelerating the trend, with 47% of respondents planning to reduce carbon emissions and energy use, and 27% planning to create lower-carbon-footprint products.

SAP’s Carbon Footprint

SAP announced it will reduce its greenhouse gas emissions down to 2000 levels by the year 2020 – a total reduction of 51% compared to 2007. SAP published its first Sustainability Report last year, which was rated a “C” by the Global Reporting Initiative. It already leads the software sector in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, and appears in the FTSE4Good index. SAP also appears in the Global Challenges Index, which recognizes transparency and anti-corruption efforts, and the Global 100 list of the most sustainable large companies in the world.

SAP has a well-developed internal sustainability program

SAP’s sustainability initiatives include:

SAP Palo Alto

• Eco-efficient buildings: intelligent lighting, solar power, passive cooling systems, waste-water recycling, and rainwater collection. For example, the SAP building in Palo Alto, California has a Silver-level LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification.
• Subsidized public transportation tickets, new policies to reduce car fleet greenhouse gas emissions, and reduced travel through more extensive use of video conferencing facilities and “virtual events”.
• More efficient air conditioning in a major SAP data center in Germany.
• Recyclable paper and packaging, and internal recycling programs.

SAP’s Sustainability Organization and Framework

Peter Graf, SAP Chief Sustainability Officer

To drive and coordinate all aspects of its sustainability efforts, SAP is forming a new cross-functional sustainability organization, which will be led by Peter Graf, SAP’s first chief sustainability officer and EVP Sustainability Solutions.

The global team will oversee all sustainability-related initiatives, from the creation of solutions that enable sustainable business processes for customers to SAP’s own sustainability operations, including key social, economic and environmental programs.

SAP’s sustainability framework is based on the strategic use of IT as a catalyst for change, and includes:

• SAP solutions to enable sustainable best-run businesses
• Customer-centricity and co-innovation
• SAP as a model for corporate accountability and stewardship

Sustainability Products

SAP wants to help its customers holistically manage sustainability, in areas such as people health and safety, product safety and stewardship, environmental performance, resource efficiency, sustainability performance management, and “green IT”.

Environment, Health, and Safety Management. This new product combines SAP Environment, Health & Safety, SAP Environmental Compliance, SAP REACH Compliance and Technidata Compliance for Products, to help companies with:

• People Health & Safety: Supports the management of Health & Safety, industrial hygiene and occupational health processes, as well as compliance for product safety, hazardous substances, dangerous goods and waste management.
• Emissions Management: Helps to ensure compliance with environmental laws and policies as well as reduce associated costs, efforts and risks on plant and corporate levels.
• Product Safety & Stewardship: Helps to conform with product and material compliance regulations for all industries and secure the right to market products. For 2009, the REACH (Registration, Evaluation, and Authorization of Chemicals) compliance functionality is available separately to help organizations comply with this new European directive.

Sustainability Performance Management. SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius, Strategy Management, and Risk Management software allows customers to set up sustainability dashboards, define and cascade goals and initiatives, and tie them to sustainability key performance indicators.

Energy Data Management application. Provides utilities the means to manage energy profiles, offer real-time pricing and complex billing, and optimize energy settlements with the goal to improve energy efficiencies. This product enables a “Smart Metering” capability between a utility and its customers.

Recycling Administration application. Helps ensure compliance with worldwide recycling legislation for packaging, batteries and WEEE (waste electrical and electronic equipment), across SAP and non-SAP software, across the enterprise and beyond, giving businesses the real-time visibility they need to ensure effective business operations and corporate accountability.

Supply Chain Management application. Helps companies plan and design their supply chains, consolidate orders and optimize shipments, thus reducing CO₂ emissions and overall energy consumption.

Product Links:

• SAP Environmental Compliance
• SAP REACH Compliance
• SAP Recycling Administration
• SAP BusinessObjects solutions for governance, risk, and compliance
• SAP Product Lifecycle Management
• Environment, health, and safety compliance management applications

Sustainability 2.0: Collaboration and Co-Innovation

Corporate sustainability pioneers were typically defending themselves against reputational or regulatory risk rather than looking for financial gains. But now leading companies are moving to “sustainability 2.0” – exploiting the new opportunities that have arisen, and working closely with customers and partners on co-innovation.

Successful sustainability requires coordination across the organization, and according to the Economist survey data, relatively few organizations have been able to implement clear standards in all areas of sustainability.

In particular, organizations struggle to apply sustainability policy to the extended supply chain. Over 40% of companies rated their performance in controlling the environmental and human rights standards of their suppliers as below par – worse than any other area – and only one-fifth have implemented supplier controls in the last five years. In addition, organizations are less likely to report on supply chain human rights standards than any other area, and change is unlikely anytime soon: only 35% consider action here an important priority.

This is even more surprising given that there are many public examples of disastrous consequences from socially or environmentally damaging supply chains. Indeed, social auditing arose largely because of the embarrassing behavior of suppliers to developed-world organizations.

The root problem is that today’s global supply chains are very complex, with multiple levels of subcontracting, and there’s little transparency. This makes the chains very hard to “police”. To combat the issue of global supply chain transparency, SAP has been a keen proponent of Business Network Transformation, where companies work more closely with their increasingly interdependent ecosystem of customers, partners, and suppliers to drive transparency, growth and profitability. The drive to sustainability reinforces this trend.

Collaborative Sustainability with SAP

SAP is already working with partners with deep sustainability-related expertise to provide implementations and support co-innovation with customers, and working with technology partners on SAP relevant Green IT benchmarks, projects and standards.

SAP intends to continue collaborating with customers about their current and anticipated needs and seeking co-innovative customers to work with on sustainability. To achieve this, SAP teams will leverage existing communities such as customer communities, Industry Value Networks, Business Process Expert community, SAP EcoHub and Enterprise Services Community, to drive co-innovation activities and channels for sustainability solutions.

In particular, SAP customers and employees are invited to join in the sustainability dialog on the SAP Collaboration Workspace, where you can start discussions, take part in a SAP sustainability survey or view the survey results.

Here are the results of the survey — using SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius, of course:

Looking Forward to the Future

Many organizations are only just beginning to move beyond defensiveness and consider sustainability as a competitive advantage – but it will become much more common.

In the next five years, organizations expect to spend more time on sustainability, communicating their performance to investors and stakeholders, improving the environmental footprint of their current products and services and developing new ones, and improving their own energy efficiency.

For SAP, 2009 will see the release of two further products: Cap & Trade, an extension of the Emissions Management solution set, and a Sustainability Performance Management solution using the BusinessObjects portfolio of business intelligence, risk,  and strategy management products in conjunction with EHS.

A more detailed roadmap and additional products are intended to follow, and the next SAP sustainability report will be released in May 2009.