User Experience & Lean
Over the past few years I’ve written a few times about SAP’s internal transformation efforts. We just pre-announced record Q2 results yesterday (35%+ growth in all regions – go SAP!), and so I thought it fitting to return to the topics of growth and change and talk a little bit about the good things that are happening internally both with my User Experience team and with Lean. I have been on a multi-year journey to bring the discipline of User Experience to the operational practices of SAP. I finished my PhD in Anthropology in 2004, and I wanted to bring that social...
Read MoreGreener, happier commute
This longish blog post describes how SAP could reduce it’s carbon footprint, while achieving the company’s goals of improved employee innovation, satisfaction, and productivity. Overview One of the gems in SAP’s current strategy is the company’s focus on sustainability. I have been working for SAP for over twelve years, and for the most part I find that there are not a lot of surprises – at least, not good ones! So when I first heard about SAP’s sustainability initiative, I was admittedly skeptical, assuming that it was part of the ongoing go-to-market...
Read MoreEnd-user or business stakeholder?
[This is a modified version of a post I made internally on SAP's Lean Transformation blog. I've removed a few of the details about sales compensation, the process diagram, and the system screenshots.] One of the significant challenges we face in the User Experience work we do at SAP is working with business stakeholders who really feel that they know the end-users whom they represent in governing bodies, and that they can speak on behalf of those end-users. While in some cases that might be the case, I would argue that it’s the exception rather than the rule. If you read my...
Read MoreVoice of the Customer
[As mentioned in an earlier post, SAP has embarked on a transformation journey with a focus on Lean principles. Due to the contributions of my User Experience team into several of SAP's COO-sponsored projects (COO Programs & Projects, or COO P/Ps for short), I have been invited to blog inside SAP about our journey to becoming a Lean enterprise. To the extent that confidentiality allows, I will cross-post those entries here. This is my first post to the group blog, in which I explain the synergistic relationship between Lean / Voice of the Customer and our User Experience services.]...
Read MorePutting Lean in context
[NOTE: This post was originally titled Deconstructing Lean. I renamed Putting Lean in context on 3/26/09, because the post got so long I never got around to the deconstruction of the Lean concepts. That's coming in a future post, so stay tuned! Natalie] When I first conducted ethnographic research at SAP as part of my job, I was working in the U.S. Sales Operations. That organization’s priority was to establish systems and services to drive sales productivity. Simply measured, sales productivity is the amount of software license revenue per Account Executive (AE, or sales...
Read MoreMeeting Ernie, learning Lean
One of the funny things about SAP is that we refer to our highest-ranking executives by their first names - Leo, Bill, Henning, Marty, Ernie, Hasso, Shai … Not that there aren’t other Germans at SAP named Henning! But when you just say ‘Henning’, everyone knows who you’re talking about. In my case, I’m really excited to tell you that (as part of SAP’s Top Talent program) I had the chance to have lunch and speak with Ernie in September last year, during his worldwide Listen & Learn Tour. There are a couple of reasons I didn’t write...
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