This link has been bookmarked by 18 people . It was first bookmarked on 04 Oct 2007, by Martin M.
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07 Feb 08
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09 Jan 08
Lee ClemmerI can vouch for the fact that SAP is doing some cool 2.0 stuff. The next few years will definitely be interesting
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21 Nov 07
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Surely SAP is a big, boring enterprise software company, about as far from the furious consumer innovation of Web 2.0 as you can imagine. Yet it's been clear to me for years that SAP takes the ideas of Web 2.0 very seriously
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I particularly liked the demo of a project SAP is working on with a large property manager in Switzerland, to build models in Second Life that are tied via sensors to real buildings. The prototype is only a small model building, a doll-house, so to speak, but this is definitely the future of property management: open a door in the real building, a door opens in the SL analogue.
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SAP is also doing some great "in vivo" co-development with customers, with customer innovators invited to spend six months working directly with the imagineering team at SAP, reporting what they learn back to their company via blogs, wikis, and podcasts. I've often noted that Web 2.0 actually began with open source and collaborative development as early examples of how networking changed business processes. Here's a really practical way for enterprises to put new forms of collaboration to work.
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SAP still needs a long way to go.
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By other hand, I think there is a lot of thinks happening in web by last years, great, you put it a label "web2.0", and that was great, we had a way to call it, excellent. But calling SAP a "Web 2.0 company" is a different thing, I can agree that SAP are using web2.0 apps externally and internally, but "web2.0 company" can be a deceptive concept, what is a web2.0 company ? just a company using web2.0 apps ? when you (or your team) put "web2.0" label to thinks happening in web was clear to me, but now it's not clear about "web 2.0 company" concept.
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Tim O'Reilly [10.04.07 09:06 AM]
Ignacio -- No, I'm not saying that SAP is sharing your configuration info without your knowledge or consent. I'm just saying that sharing such data (with consent! but perhaps by default) is one way an enterprise software company *could* create network effects that make its software better for each user as a result of the participation by other users.
Other ways might even be for customers to share private sales data with a third party provider in return for "norming." Thomson has a service like this. Law firms upload their legal records so that they can see what share they have of the business at major firms in each category: "You have 3% of GE's compliance business."
By my definition, a web 2.0 company is one that uses internet-fueled network effects to build services that get better as a direct result of user interaction. Figuring out all the clever different ways to do this is the heart of Web 2.0.
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Tim O'Reilly [10.04.07 05:13 PM]
Great example, Rob. A lot of Web 2.0 is really simple things like this: thinking through how to create intelligent feedback loops in products, so that information flows through the system in the same way it flows through our own brains. That's one reason why I love Microsoft's term "Live Software" and regret that it's too narrowly associated with Microsoft's online platform rather than the whole class of software that gets better the more people use it.
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> Simply by watching what groups form, they were
> able to learn more about employee interests than
> from any number of surveys. For example, as a
> result of the large group that formed on
> meditation, they added "quiet rooms" to some of
> their facilities; seeing the interest in
> ping-pong, they added ping pong tables. Small
> things, but collective intelligence at work
> nonetheless.Collective intelligence? Are you sure you meant to use that word in that context? If one person or a group of persons makes decisions/judgements based on observations it's the plain old kind o intelligence.
Now, if those ping pong tables had "emerged" through some uncoordinated group effort, where everybody felt like bringing some part of a ping pong table - that would have been collective intelligence. ;-) -
Google is clearly a very strong example. Its index gets better as there are more quality sites (but worse as there are more spammers); its ad auction likewise. It learns from user searches, it learns from people's link behavior, it learns from user's click patterns, it learns from what ads are clicked on. Its whole competitive advantage is in being better at mining and responding to the participants in its ecosystem. This is very close to "intelligence."
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So network effects-based systems are the basic loam in which web 2.0 collective intelligence applications can grow, but it requires tending and harvesting the intelligence, and not just letting the network effects remain "dumb."
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Conficio [10.07.07 03:10 PM]
SAP has not to invent the collaborative model with its customers. It has been build on this.
SAP has for years been an open source company, albeit not a free open source company. Not withstanding, that todays SAP management claims open source is evil business. SAP always shared their application code with their customers (licensees) and they in turn did modify it or build their own additions and extensions.
Such customers quickly learned that software development costs are not sunk costs, but rather that the maintenance costs are larger than the original development costs. This is especially true in an environement where the underlying platform (SAP standard releases) does upgrade frequently. Many customers with theri own extensions have tended to approach SAP for integration of their code base into the standard, this way benefitting the overall eco-system. SAP usually did not pay anything for this code and customers were happy to just save the maintenance costs and have a faster upgrade path.
This is a big part of SAP's success.
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Alexander Pohoyda [10.12.07 06:29 AM]
Earlier in the year, Hasso Plattner, one of the company’s founders said the company made an early mistake by allowing customers access to the code. This lead to code proliferation and the creation of one off processes over which the company had little control but which it has had to support ever since. Expressions like ‘never again’ and ‘over my dead body’ are the ways in which SAP executives have described their forward looking approach to customization. Instead, Kagermann adds: “We’ll provide rich configurations and extensions as and when customers are ready. But not customizations.”
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23 Oct 07
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10 Oct 07
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06 Oct 07
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04 Oct 07
maggie foxThe benefits of allowing people to self-organize from an HR/internal comms perspective (at the end of the article)
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Frank HammSurely SAP is a big, boring enterprise software company, about as far from the furious consumer innovation of Web 2.0 as you can imagine. Yet it's been clear to me for years that SAP takes the ideas of Web 2.0 very seriously.
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