The final speaker before lunch was Dennis Moore, with SAP Labs. He’s the General Manager of Emerging Labs at SAP. He’s speaking about Enterprise 2.1

Key talking points:

• 500 years ago everything was task work. Today it is information work, even in traditionally task work like farming. This transition isn’t necessarily a good thing for SAP, because they are in the business of automating task work.
• So … SAP became more interested and involved in edge processes for collaboration and information sharing. IDC’s recent research found that Web 2.0 is penetrating the enterprise … such as blogs, wikis, and RSS. SAP is using these technologies in strategic ways to engage with their SAP Developer Network (SDN), among other initiatives.
• People increasingly bring expectations of what computing should be like at the office from home, which is a big change from 20 years ago. Eg, 200 MB limit on email at work, compared to 2000 MB to unlimited storage on Yahoo / Google Gmail. This is the consumerization of IT … people have better stuff at home than at the office.
• Is this a problem? Eg, lack of compliance with corporate policies? Manual migration of content? Dennis argues yes … non-integrated applications are bad. He says that these tools should be integrated with core business platforms and applications … they can be embedded into processes, they are fully compliant with corporate governance and risk standards, etc.
• So what’s “Enterprise 2.1”? Enterprise 2.0 = Enhancing Existing Processes + Creating Enterprise Mashups. The .1 comes through the extra addition of “Enable emergent processes”.
• Eg, Enhance Existing Processes … add things to processes that users want that make it easier and more fun to use.
• Eg, Create Enterprise Mashups … of enterprise and Web-based data and processes. Users can pull together different items from different systems to track problems toward resolution.
• Eg, Enable Emergent Processes … leverage collective intelligence, enhance work patterns, and improve self-sufficiency.

SAP is not merely selling 2.0 tools, it is also seeking to use 2.0 tools to revolutionize its business. Eg, the SAP Developer’s Network. There are about 850,000 participants, and people can get answers to questions within 30 minutes … which is much faster than other channels to resolution.

Time for lunch.