I am enjoying In-Memory Data Management- An Inflexion Point for Enterprise Applications – SAP kindly sent me an advance copy of the book by Dr. Hasso Plattner and Alexander Zeier. I am also watching Vishal Sikka, SAP’s CTO present this morning at its “New Reality” event in Boston talk about in-memory, mobility, clouds – as he says making the enterprise “cool again”
But I keep going back to a recent conversation on technology innovation I was part of. One of the participants defined an innovative company as one which generated at least half of its revenues from products introduced in the last two years. I like that definition – not just products a company marketed as innovative, but those its customers embraced in droves and quickly adopted. Apple iPad and Microsoft Kinect come to mind. Millions of units sold in months, (though admittedly Kinect does not make up half of Microsoft sales)
I find myself fascinated every time I listen to Hasso Plattner talk about in-memory (and the book brings out his passion for it in his professorial style). But I have heard him and SAP talk about it for years now (and I profiled him and the promise of in-memory analytics in my book last year) – yet product rollout via what it terms HANA and customer adoption has been a trickle.
Dr. Plattner’s book spends an entire chapter on cloud computing – and how in-memory computing will play an ever-increasing role in clouds. Again, SAP rollout of its cloud and customer adoption of that cloud has been slower than a trickle.
The issue is SAP is content selling older on-premise ERP and Business Objects technology. It would be like Apple moving to 3 year product rollout cycles, so we would just be seeing iPhone2 and we would wait till 2013 to see iPad2.
Well, Apple has not slowed down and that is the new benchmark for innovation. Love to see SAP similarly get half its revenues from HANA and clouds and other new products Vishal and team dream up.
Reengineering Work: Obliterate AND Automate
I have been invited to moderate a customer panel on next-gen BPO at the Cognizant Community event next week. The theme of the conference is “The Future of Work”. When I look at the wide range of industries represented on the panel, the economic models behind today’s BPO, the technologies which are influencing every business process, it is a good time to revisit Dr.Michael Hammer’s seminal 1990 Harvard Business Review article .
The article spawned a wave of process reengineering, process benchmarking, shared service consolidations and first wave BPO in the 90s. Unfortunately, way too many companies ignored the “don’t automate” part of his message and there was also plenty of wasted dollars around ERP, Y2K, ebiz projects which they are paying for even today. (To be fair, he sent mixed messages by aligning with SAP and Deloitte – their “do automate” messages were fairly loud).
Twenty years later, we find every company under pressure to redo technology and older forms of outsourcing. The consumerization decade is exposing how poorly in contrast enterprise technology has performed. As Cognizant executives like to say “After Sunday night with home based technologies, it is quite a let down to go in to work technologies on Monday morning.”
The challenging economy and rapidly shifting industry lines are forcing companies to evaluate what is “core” and what is “context” (to use Geoffrey Moore’s terms) – shows in the panel that vertical process BPO is growing much faster than traditional horizontal BPO. Clouds and SaaS business models are allowing companies to look for BPO and other outsourcing which is much more variable and results based.
And technology is allowing us to rethink just about every process. RFID and other tags are redefining asset management processes. Social networks are reshaping CRM processes. QR codes are redefining expense tracking. As companies introduce “smart products” for their industries they are having to factor support for embedded technology in their R&D, customer support and product management processes.
I dare say if Dr. Hammer was still alive today, he would agree the time is right for plenty of process obliteration and plenty of process automation.
March 11, 2011 in Industry Commentary, Outsourcing (Business Process - BPO) | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)