Zeichick's Take: Seven Drivers of Development Innovation
May 10, 2007 —
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Whenever you have the opportunity to listen to a co-founder of SAP talk about innovation, it's worth listening. SAP is unique among the Giant Software Companies in that it's reinvented itself many times: from a big mainframe enterprise resource planning provider, to a purveyor of massive client/server software, to a maker of a Java application server platform (NetWeaver). Today, it's trying to reinvent itself again, into a SOA-driven software-as-a-service company that offers a whole new hosted application platform.
At the Software 2007 conference, which took place earlier this week in Santa Clara, Calif., Hasso Plattner spoke about drivers for innovation. Plattner, a former IBMer, helped found SAP in 1972, served as its CEO, and today is chairman of its supervisory board, as well as its chief software advisor—a great job title.
Here are seven points that I extracted from Plattner's fire-hose presentation, which alone was worth the price of admission to the conference:
1. Focus on user requirements, instead of thinking only about business requirements. In the past, Plattner said, SAP talked mainly to high-level executives at its customer companies, and built software (like R/3) which addressed what those executives said the business needed. By doing that, he said, SAP missed a lot of features and functions that its software should have delivered. For its new SaaS products, SAP's new emphasis is on figuring out what its users need instead.
2. Separate user interfaces from applications—and be willing to have multiple user interfaces to an application. R/3 had a single user interface for all customers, no matter how big or small they were, what industry they were, or what type of tasks the users were performing. The company has learned that it's better to separate the UI from the core application. Have a single application, with a single code, but build GUIs that fit the customer, instead of expecting that one GUI model fits all.
3. Hosted software works, and works well, even for business-critical applications. Google and Salesforce.com have demonstrated that SaaS works, Plattner pointed out. "The complete enterprise can run in the cloud," he said, "and every year it becomes more obvious that the cloud is a viable alternative to on-site computing."
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