Rebound and Rethink

Abstract

All that we have looked at so far had already been in existence or has now finally become affordable. Yes, the new delivery model in the Cloud is enticing, the speed of transactions is mind-boggling, real-time analytics are possible, and enterprise applications are vastly improved – yet, what are the real breakthroughs on the horizon? In order to identify potential innovations, we must re-examine business processes using the Design Thinking methods that we will detail in Chapter 6: Leveraging Design Thinking in Co-Innovation Projects. The groundwork of data collection is mostly complete and we can build upon this data. Instead of moving data between systems, we learned that we should instead integrate the new enterprise applications with other cloud offerings, and build a loosely bound federation with one standard system – the HANA platform. SAP has begun many co-innovation projects, in which the customer contributes the domain knowledge and SAP provides the technical expertise. The advantage of the Design Thinking methodology is that a diverse group of people is able to work together to identify unsatisfied user needs, collect facts from a wider circle, develop ideas, build prototypes together, and start to iterate. It is important that this heterogeneous group stays together, as all participants will learn during the design process and become able to contribute more and more efficiently. The classic approach of analysis, development, documentation, testing, and production in a waterfall model has been outdated for years. However, we still observe a strong separation between the worlds of business professionals and software developers nowadays. It is understood that time is an issue and that commitment to a project is not easy to manage, but the more a heterogeneous team is able to work together, the better and sooner results are produced.