Like many people I've been waiting for those clever people at SAP to enter the Social Operating Systems space so I was not so surprised this week when readwriteweb announced that SAP had a competitor to Google Wave. But no.
SAPs new technology codenamed 12sprints (yeh) is a mechanism to formalize light-weight human-centric workflows using collaborative technologies. It's not anything like a social operating system though and I don't see it ever being one.
Like IRISalign from Software AG, 12sprints is about collaborative BPM. In my view it's looking at organizational design in a historical perspective of 'mechanization rules'. I'm not convinced this reflects what's likely to happen in the 21st century world of more open labor markets where loosely coupled groups will come together to deliver project outcomes. For these sorts of products to be successful, they'd have to completely dominate the market and I don't see it happening. I think it's far more likely that LinkedIn and Facebook will move into the business domain and start to provide BPM functionality (but I don't expect that will happen either).
This brings me back to thinking that Google Wave and Encanvas Squork are on the right tracks and - with much larger potential communities of users - are ideally placed to add BPM functionality into their business focussed social operating systems.
Like many people I've been waiting for those clever people at SAP to enter the Social Operating Systems space so I was not so surprised this week when readwriteweb announced that SAP had a competitor to Google Wave. But no.
SAPs new technology codenamed 12sprints (yeh) is a mechanism to formalize light-weight human-centric workflows using collaborative technologies. It's not anything like a social operating system though and I don't see it ever being one.
Like IRISalign from Software AG, 12sprints is about collaborative BPM. In my view it's looking at organizational design in a historical perspective of 'mechanization rules'. I'm not convinced this reflects what's likely to happen in the 21st century world of more open labor markets where loosely coupled groups will come together to deliver project outcomes. For these sorts of products to be successful, they'd have to completely dominate the market and I don't see it happening. I think it's far more likely that LinkedIn and Facebook will move into the business domain and start to provide BPM functionality (but I don't expect that will happen either).
This brings me back to thinking that Google Wave and Encanvas Squork are on the right tracks and - with much larger potential communities of users - are ideally placed to add BPM functionality into their business focussed social operating systems.
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