Jim Sinur

Well TechEd start out with a bang Monday evening with a guest keynote from Jane McGonigal, where she put the explanation point the benefits of gaming to solving a myriad of problems for mankind. Since I have two sons gainfully employed in the gaming sector, I have to agree. One is working on collaborative games and the other is working on teaching autistic children how to act in social situations. Jane is an inspiring speaker.

The next day Vishal Sikka, SAP’s CTO, spoke on Saps new innovation HANA and the importance of mobile in the new world. HANA is starting as a innovative “in memory database” that will subsume more “in memory functionality” over time allowing clients to work in a more time to market way. There were several real world examples of production processes that benefited from HANA including Chinas largest bottled water company. The examples were of better processes and speeding up time lags these companies. Hmm, better processes. That begs the question. What is SAP’s view of BPM and where is it going?

The Technical View:

SAP has a significant number of great technologies to bring together to create a great ” Next Gen” BPMS including complex events, analytics, business rules management and HANA. In addition SAP has some automated process business process discovery that can watch process vapor trails as work progresses through the SAP applications themselves to desired business outcomes. This is good stuff and the BPM folks at SAP have a vision for bring it all together to create something special.

The Management View:

SAP’s management gets HANA and Mobile, but does not think BPM is a high enough priority yet to be put on HANA immediately. This is a shame as clients are constantly calling us, at Gartner, asking how to surround SAP applications with process. This is not a view SAP management doesn’t seem to get right now. We can only hope that all the great pieces will come together and be put on top of HANA in a speedier fashion. It’s now a matter of priorities rather than possessing the technologies and skills. It’s a matter of will.

Bottom Line:

If the SAP BPM architects and technicians can show customer value that catches top managements eye, the wait will be shorter. Right now, it looks to be another two years. With that said, look at what SAP has done in BPM from two years ago. http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/10/14/teched-09saps-bpm-and-brm-progress-to-date-watch-out-for-construction-cones/

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Category: Applications BPM Business Process Improvement Business Rules Cloud EA ERP Green IT Governance Optimization Simulation Social Strategic Planning Vendor Contracts Virtualization     Tags: BPM, Business Process Improvement, Business Rules, Decision Management, Optimization, Process Improvement, Process Management, Simulation, Social, symposium

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