Café Innovation Blog

[Cross-posted from SAP Community Network: Puneet Suppal’s SAP Network Blog ]

I have recently returned from SAP Tech Ed ’08 in Las Vegas. The lights and sounds of Vegas that so many of you are familiar with were very much there, but in addition there was a heightened sense of “where are we going next” at the conference. The attendees and SAP alike were interested in looking ahead to what evolutionary actions were going to be most beneficial, and to venture into interesting new territory. In partnership with SAP’s Marco ten Vaanholt, I made my contribution toward the former (Lecture Session BPM 104: The Business Process Enterprise Imperative: Business Process Experts in action). And, addressing the latter, SAP announced its InnoCentive based initiative that was certainly a very intriguing addition to the discussion of how do we create/foster a climate of innovation.

The recorded video of the lecture session (referenced above) will be available online soon to at least all Tech Ed attendees. If you are planning to attend SAP Tech Ed in Berlin (October) or in Bangalore (November) this year, you will have an opportunity to attend this lecture session in person at those events. Hopefully, we have made the case that getting your processes right is a very important pre-requisite for an organization to achieve true success with its SOA initiative. If processes are not addressed first, we run the very real risk of achieving only sub-optimal results. The coinciding release of the first edition of the BPX Community book, Process First, at Tech Ed drives home this fact. Another point I hope our lecture attendees walked away with is that there are ways and means today that were not perhaps available a decade ago that blunt the argument that the ideal process (perhaps, a mission-critical business-defining or differentiating one) cannot be deployed because of technology or governance limitations. SAP’s announcement of its InnoCentive based initiative has helped this position.

SAP announced its sponsorship of the SAP Innovation and Technology Pavilion along with InnoCentive. This provides a forum for “Seekers” to present problems in need of cutting edge solutions and “Solvers” to present solutions that could win handsome cash awards. The idea according to SAP is based on “tapping SAP’s Community which will be actively participating in the SAP sponsored Innovation and Technology Pavilion.” The thinking is that this “type of Innovation is a powerful tool by which all members of the SAP Ecosystem combine their collective talents to solve critical problems facing SAP, its clients and partners, and also the wider community of business software users.” The expectation is that this will lead to “bigger breakthroughs – faster – at lower cost.” The more cool aspect of this to me is that now yet another level of solution seekers and providers can work through the community (be it SDN or BPX) ; it is my understanding that InnoCentive will manage all Intellectual Property (IP) matters between both sides of the equation. As stated in his blog (https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/10923), Mark Yolton, Senior Vice President of the SDN and BPX communities at SAP, expects that SAP’s “customers and partners — and even companies not at all associated with SAP — will become Seekers by posing challenges that will incent the community to produce deeper insights thru co-innovation.”

I am confident that this is not the last step SAP, and, for that matter, others in the ecosystem, will take to further the cause of innovation because such steps help organizations accelerate their ability to establish agile platforms. Such steps emphasize that your differentiating business process is supreme and that it should not be limited by what a certain “out-of-the-box” offering forces you to think the boundaries should be. As you dream of the ideal solution, there is perhaps a way out there that helps you make it work with your platform – and, this can come to you without your having to compromise on your process! Such avenues, current and future, should give your organization the confidence that technology solutions that are better than those of the past will be found for unique processes, and consequently allow you to focus on your processes to lay a solid foundation for your SOA efforts. This confidence should lead you to work on getting these processes right first and to provide the right organizational set up (see my post, Café Innovation – Is your organization’s leadership committed to delivering on The Business Process Enterprise (BPEn)?, Sep 5, 2008) that fosters a climate where constant process refinement and process renewal are a way of life. Such an environment is the perfect setting for an organization to succeed in achieving process excellence and, consequently, true SOA success.

– Puneet Suppal [Enterprise SOA Solutions & Innovation – Capgemini]

[Cross-posted from SAP Community Network: Puneet Suppal’s SAP Network Blog ]

In an earlier post (Café Innovation – The Business Process Enterprise), I had sought to make the case for recognizing that the business process orientation of an organization is an imperative that can make the difference between the success and failure of its SOA journey. We said that if process excellence were to be achieved, we needed to move away from the traditional functional silos and the damaging divide between IT and Business. In my SAP NetWeaver Magazine (Summer 2008) column, I introduced this in an article titled: SOA Success: Is Your Organization a Business Process Enterprise? While this article made the point that “until an organization can truly function as a Business Process Enterprise, it will not be able to fully exploit its enterprise SOA capabilities,” the successor piece in my column appearing in the Fall 2008 issue of this same magazine, titled: SOA Success: The Role of Senior Management in Establishing a Business Process Enterprise seeks to point out that this will remain a noble goal unless there is true and demonstrable senior leadership commitment to taking the organization beyond just using SOA as another enabling tool.

In my interaction with individuals at SAP events and within various organizations, I have noticed a lot of excitement in the rank and file of most organizations where individuals are motivated to transform into business process experts. Questions about what they should do are beginning to come from these individuals and from their leaders alike. Now, we also find other thinkers and practitioners beginning to call for recognizing the importance of giving business process its due place. For example, in this same Fall 2008 issue of the SAP NetWeaver Magazine I find it encouraging that a fellow columnist, in discussing the need for an organization to embark on its Enterprise Architecture journey, concludes that this will likely have to start “with new emphasis on business process definition and organizational support ” (The Enterprise Architecture Journey Starts Now by Adolf Allesch); this is a position that essentially agrees with my premise about the primacy of business processes. Yet again, within the cover story of this same issue (7 Best Practices You Can Put in Place Now to Make Your Future Upgrade a Breeze by Evan J. Albright) there is a clear example of how IT/business assimilation is an important success factor (also raised in this forum through an earlier post, “Café Innovation – Going beyond IT-Business alignment and integration” on April 6, 2008). These are just two examples of this thought pattern beginning to take hold. It is now the turn of senior leaders within every organization that seeks success with SOA to consider this seriously, for this can make the difference between merely upgrading your technology landscape, versus giving yourself a platform from where you can launch the ability to benefit from executable process models and adapt dynamically to the demands of changing business models. As the column, “SOA Success: The Role of Senior Management in Establishing a Business Process Enterprise” states, “the onus is on senior management to articulate the case for change and to support the organization through the necessary shifts that this significant transformation involves.”

I invite you to read the above-referenced article, and join the discussion here. Tell us what your senior leadership has contemplated on this front? What are some definitive initiatives they have undertaken to provide permanent primacy to business processes?

P.S. The SAP NetWeaver Magazine is available online at: http://www.netweavermagazine.com/

– Puneet Suppal [Enterprise SOA Solutions & Innovation – Capgemini]