Introducing SAP StreamWork: New Decision Collaboration

Timo Elliott — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 14:10:44 +0000

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.

SAP’s Gravity Prototype: Business Collaboration Using Google Wave

Timo Elliott — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:59:05 +0000

Alexander Dreiling of SAP Research in Brisbane, Australia, has posted on a great prototype called Gravity that uses Google Wave to collaborate around business process.

Gravity is a Google Wave “gadget” that can be added within the Google Wave client. It lets participants in a wave use the business process modeling functionality of SAP Business Process Management collaboratively, in near-real time. David Cook called it “the best business example of Google Wave, period!”

The demo shows the result of a merger of a bank and an insurance company. They now need to restructure their business processes and capitalize quickly on cross-selling opportunities between banking and insurance, and a variety of different expertise across the new organization is needed to model the new process flows, both from business and IT.

As they build the model, the additions from each modeler are color-coded, and the process is documented using the Google Wave tools. A Google “robot” is used to check the model for syntax, and the result is exported in industry-standard BPMN 2.0 XML.

The prototype was featured at the SAP TechEd event in Phoenix this week, and one team at the Business Process Design Slam event have posted on their experience of using the tool, using it to automate business processes related to forming a virtual community-based power plant made up of resident’s personal solar wind generation.

The idea is to describe a process that allows a homeowner or business to come online as a micro generator within a township and the various steps (human and automated) that are required. Sustainability gets better over time, the more neighborhoods choose to generate power from green sources to supply the very power this neighborhood consumes – and in pretty much the same timeframe. This also reduces the losses of transporting power over longer distances. Thus, power companies will more and more become brokers, and less actual suppliers of power.

…you are in a contract with the ‘virtual power plant’ and you can either be within the parameters of the contract and receive the good rates, or go above your contracted power consumption and must pay additional fees. (This can be due to a couple of things, you have bad weather and do not produce enough power and now must consume power at a higher rate. Or for certain reasons you must consume more power than previously contracted, because you have guests in town and must run your a/c on high). At this point, you can continue your contract, or go back and re-contract your plan. (Similar to a cell phone company where you can re-adjust your plan after several months of going over your minutes)

Here’s a glimpse of the process-building experience:

SAP Web 2.0 » Gravity