Social Innovations In SAP and SuccessFactors

On June 12th, 2013 at HRInsider Amsterdam, I will be talking about the current and planned social innovations in SAP and SuccessFactors products and how you can take advantage of such innovation to empower your employees and engage them every day. I will be talking about the following things. I will show you how...

1.You can appeal to the texting generation with mobile recruiting
2.You can use social onboarding to make your new hires productive fast
3.You can help your employees discover experts and content on the go
4.You can enable informal learning tools to enable peer to peer learning
5.Your can empower employees to take charge of their performance with mobile goals.
6.Your hiring team collaboration can lead to superior hiring decisions
7.You can integrate Social with SAP HR using Social ABAP Integration Library (SAIL)

Here is a taste of things to come, thanks to my colleague Keith Hamrick from the Jam product team.

SAP Jam Integration With Financials OnDemand

More than eighty percent of our work involves exceptions. Exceptions lead to conversations with someone about some thing. The thing we want to discuss is usually a digital artifact such as a document or picture.

SAP Jam provides a way to discuss any document with people inside and outside the company to resolve such exceptions efficiently. Here is a very good scenario.

Prototyping From A Whiteboard Sketch

Today Alex Joseph, Enric Gili and I were brainstorming about an app enabled by HANA technology. During the session, we followed our design philosophy of thinking mobile first and sketched a mobile user experience on the white board. Enric suggested that we use an iPhone prototyping tool called POP, which our colleague Fazlul Hoque had recommended a few days back. Faz is a fellow design thinker and believes in the philosophy of Look and Flow.

The app is advertised as a tool to make iPhone prototyping easier for those who draw on paper. We realized that the same holds good for those who draw on the white board too.

So when you have a simple prototyping flow sketched on the white board during a prototyping session, you can take pictures of the screens using your iPhone and within minutes create a rough prototype, right there on your iPhone, to simulate the look and flow of your idea. You can also share the same with your colleagues via email within seconds.

Check out the app at Popapp.in   If you are interested in our product design philosophy and methodology where we discuss many such techniques, check our kindle book Look and Flow.

Artists and Engineers

Most people think that engineers and artists think very differently. I am not so sure. There is a very systematic approach to creating art. There are some famous people who are great artists and engineers. Michelangelo is a good example. When I sketch, I normally take a very systematic approach. Let me explain using one of recent drawings.

First I study the structure of the object I am drawing and understand the common characteristics.

Step 1 : I draw the trunk of the tree with a 2B pencil.
Step 2 : I then draw the second level branches with a B pencil.
Step 3 : Then I use a F pencil to draw the fine twigs and some leaves.

Tree against the setting sun in SAP's Palo Alto, CA Campus

I have methods like this to draw a building, a person, a pine tree and so on. I am pretty sure every good artist takes a systematic approach to his or her art. My hope is that all product managers will start drawing and sketching their ideas. It is a great way to communicate ideas to colleagues, customers and partners.

Turning Search Into Questions and Storifying Feeds

The social software Bloomfire, has a couple of interesting features.

Blank Search Results are turned Into Questions
When someone searches for a term in a social software rather than display "no results" Bloomfire nudges the searcher to post a question about the search. The software then prompts appropriate people to answer that question. A bit like Quora.

Simple updates are combined into stories
It also has a feature to build stories out of the feeds in a social group. A bit like Storify. I see some innovative ideas emerging to tame the feed and make meaning out of it.

An update is not just a statement anymore
An update itself is starting to grow in importance and become a short story. A tweet or a Facebook post is not just an update anymore. It is starting to become a short story about something interesting you did at home or something meaningful you did at work. People always wrote stories. But the effort required to turn an interesting experience into an interesting story is becoming lesser and lesser. Facebook already refers to every update as stories. I will write about it more in a later post.