...I would join a SAP customer and lobby to become part of the SAP Imagineering Fellowship program. SAP experimented with the program last year with Colgate-Palmolive and is in the process of expanding to a handful of newer customers.
I say that after I spent another hour with Denis Browne heads that group for SAP. I had lunch with him a few weeks before. This time we appropriately in a "virtual meeting" (using Adobe's Connect) and he gave me a 50,000 foot view on some of the projects his group is working on:
- Widgets which allow for much more graphical presentation of enterprise CRM and other data
- Presentation of external RSS and other feeds alongside internal enterprise data
- "Mirror worlds" which link virtual and physical models via SAP's configurator and other functionality
- Enterprise Knowledge Networking - "Facebook" in a corporate setting
- "The Business Internet" - leveraging RFID and other sensors in the enterprise
- A crowd-sourced "Idea marketplace" to allow for prioritization of ideas for the Group
As Dan Farber wrote last year, none of this is really that revolutionary and I have been impatient with SAP's rate of innovation - but as Denis likes to frequently point out, SAP is the custodian in which thousands of customers put faith, so any innovation has to be filtered with that caution. Which brings us back to the Fellowship program. One way to make customers more comfortable is to have them second employees.
Denis invited me to come to his his lab at Palo Alto for a hands-on visit . When I go, I will try and sneak around to see if they have "Back to the Future" technology there which can turn my age back to 25:)
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