SAP Web 2.0 » Labs

SAP Social Network Analyzer Prototype

Timo Elliott — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 18:12:00 +0000

[update -- there's now a v2 available]

SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center has just unveiled a prototype of some great new Web 2.0 technology called Social Network Analyzer (SNA). It aggregates existing enterprise data to display and discover organizational relationships. It provides the missing link between social networking platforms and enterprise information systems, by letting organizations leveraging data available in corporate information systems.

SNA helps jump-start social networking within the organization by letting you import and aggregate all the corporate relationships between people that are already recorded in your business applications, such as:

Management hierarchies from your human resources system
Data on who worked on which deals from your sales force automation system
Partner, customer, and partner supplier contacts along your supply chain
People who work on similar transactions within your operational systems

If appropriate, this data could then be supplemented with other opt-in relationship data, such as instant messenger contacts, twitter contacts, etc. It’s a great step towards bringing Enterprise 2.0 into reality.

How Does it Work?

SNA can accept relationship information from any system, using a simple, open format (e.g. name of object 1, name object 2, type of relationship, category data) and stores it in a relationship-centric database structure. Once the information is stored, it can be used to filter and browse the connections between people. There are three main tabs available in the interface:

The “Refine” Tab

You start analyzing the network by filtering using on any criteria available in the underlying data base, such as geography, role, project, or company. SNA automatically aggregates and displays data about the chosen group. For example, you could filter using the name of a customer account. SNA would then display all the people who had some connection with that account, and a breakdown of their profile (by job title, for example). Groups of people (such as regular committees or existing cross-functional project teams) can also be represented and included in the network. When you click on an individual, you can see details collected from multiple systems.

The “Explore” Tab

By clicking on any individual, you can view the relationships they are part of. By changing the drop-down menus you can switch between different types of relationship (“reports to”, “worked on project with”, etc.), and choose different types of representation (standard organization chart, ego-centric view, etc.)

The “Connect” Tab

The “connect” tab lets you determine the shortest number of relationship steps between various individuals, across the various different types of relationships available in the system.

At any time, you can collect people in the “clipboard” area by right-clicking their names. You can then email these people or export their names (and other relevant details) to any other system.

What Are the Benefits?

SNA augments and extends any existing enterprise 2.0 or social media strategies: helping locate experts in the organization, build communities, manage employee talent, or reorganize business processes. It’s ideal for collecting people to work on cross-functional teams or analyzing relationships with your customers or suppliers across the whole organization.

SNA can be embedded into other applications. Providing this type of enterprise social networking and collaboration functionality is a key part of the next generation of “business user” applications that use technology to help transform the daily processes of business people just as ERP systems have transformed transactional processes.

Next Step: Try it Yourself!

SNA is a prototype today, and is covered by the standard licensing terms of the SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center. Your feedback is strongly encouraged: what functionality needs to be added? What are the key areas where this technology could be the most useful? You can access and use the software yourself, using the SAP BusinessObjects OnDemand platform at sna-demo.ondemand.com.

Please send your comments directly to SAP BusinessObjects innovation center.

Collaborative Web 2.0 Innovation With SAP

Timo Elliott — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 16:27:41 +0000

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.

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”