Monday, June 24, 2013

Design Thinking at SAP

These days the term of design thinking became very popular buzz word. All companies are pretending to be following the pattern of design thinking. So what is it in nut shell?

Methodology commonly referred to as design thinking is a proven and repeatable problem-solving protocol that any business or profession can employ to achieve extraordinary results (from Wikipedia). It is discipline that uses designer's sensibility and methods to match what user's need and what is feasible to achieve with technologies. Basically within the design thinking has three essences: Human, business and technology. 

You may wonder what is the topic of design thinking doing on my SAP related Blog? Actually design thinking is actually used at SAP to transition SAP as software company to cloud company. It means that classic SAP which is knows (or even is famous) because of on-premise ERP systems now wants to turn it-self to SaaS model delivery of software. 

Well in SAP case it may also be just a buzzword. However it seems they consider this initiative seriously. One of SAP’s founders Hasso Plattner is involved in so called Hasso Plattner Institute of Design which is design school based in Stanford University. The school was founded by David Kelley who is well known as buddy of Steve Jobs. David’s company Ideo was behind of scenes of many famous Apple products. 

In closing I would just point that transition from purely on-premise software company to the cloud company will not be easy. SAP really needs to change its mindset. In today’s world where almost no companies do mind to store their data into the cloud it will be extreme competition with pure cloud companies. Similarly we can see how other companies not only SAP are struggling with that transition. As an example I mention SAP’s archrival – Oracle. Last week they reported not very promising result in 2nd consecutive quarter. Well maybe SAP is better positioned for that transition with their HANA offerings. But that’s something which only future will tell us.

SAP resources dedicated to design thinking:

No comments: