SAP launches 12Sprints for Collaborative Decision Making

SAP has launched its rival to Google Wave called 12Sprints. It's a platform for collaborative decision making and offers many of the functions you might expect from this type of platform. In many ways it mimics what Google Wave delivers but is more structured and perhaps better tailored for enterprise use. Here is a short intro video that covers the high points.

The tool is a good start but is more project oriented than anything. My concern is that its a standalone application that will require the business users to step out of their normal work flow and step into an application they will have to learn. Adoption would be greatly enhanced if they could weave the application features into the normal decision work flow.

More importantly, I'd like to see them integrate it seamlessly with the enterprise business intelligence layer. Allowing teams to bring in dynamic business data. The only outside information that can be imported into the platform is a manual process and seems to be limited to PDF, Images and Excel....yuck. Without access to the rich, deep and real-time enterprise information this platform won't really help you solve much. lastly the program relies too heavily on email. It needs a more instant IM based communication layer. To quote Bill French "Email is where knowledge goes to die" Real-time communication is critical.

I commend SAP for starting down this road and I hope to see them add real power to the platform in the future.

Update on Friday, February 19, 2010 at 10:44AM by Shawn Rogers

I attended a briefing with SAP today and got more info on 12Sprints and the good news is they see things not to far off from my initial review. More improvements are coming, what you see today is a public beta. The good news is that they are going to enhance the enterprise data access and freshness of data issues. Sorry NDA stops me from going into greater details. (I hate NDA's)

How do you establish a meritocracy in a highly dispersed environment?

The title of my post today is a quote from the New Your Times interview with SunGard President and C.E.O Cristóbal Conde titled Structure? The Flatter, the Better by Adam Bryant . The idea of flattening your organization and introducing platforms and cultures that spawn creativity and innovation through coolaboration and social networking tools hits me right where I live! He made many good points throughout the interview but his focus on collaboration was the most noteworthy.

Mr. Conde praised the social platform Yammer for opening up the conversations within his company on a global basis and allowing his teams to share ideas.

I think that a C.E.O. needs to focus more on the platform that enables collaboration, because employees already have all the data. They have access to everything. You have to work on the structure of collaboration.    -Cristóbal Conde

On Monday I talked about the evolution of the Social Business and focused on the Project Greenlight effect of managers using social and coolaborative platfrom to surface innovation and to act like movie producers green lighting the best of the best ideas it seems the Mr. Conde sees things in a similar light.

I think the role of the boss is to then work on those collaboration platforms, as opposed to being the one making the decisions. It’s more like the producer of the show, rather than being the lead.   -Cristóbal Conde

Congratulations to Mr. Conde for seeing the upside of structured social networking within the enterprise to drive his company forward.