The Social Organization

These are interesting times at SAP. We have product releases every four months on tens of products. An army of account executives are meeting tens of customers every week and funneling their desire, business problems and specific requirements to the product teams. We realized that traditional methods of enablement alone is not going to cut it. So apart from the regular enablement sessions, we decided to build a peer to peer learning model where any one in the team can learn from anyone else in real time.

One of my jobs now-a-days at SAP is to build a community for SAP HCM product teams, marketing teams and sales teams with the specific purpose of rapidly and continuously enabling all colleagues with the product knowledge that is generated within the product teams and customer knowledge that is generated by our pursuit teams.

One of the account executives while talking to a Fortune 500 customer spoke very proudly about this rapid and peer-to-peer learning model. He made my day.

I watch and learn by looking at what my SuccessFactors colleagues have been doing to enable their field colleagues and solution consultants with knowledge about new releases and competition.

I also look for guidance from other practitioners and from analysts who have observed other practitioners. I recently referred to the book  The Social Organization by Anthony J. Bradley, Mark P. McDonald. It comes highly rated.