Innovation – the price to pay


Everyone and his brother is out there on social media lamenting on lack of disruptive innovation.  While I don’t pretend to be a big innovator, there is a portion of my work that can be termed as “innovation” , or even “disruptive innovation”.  And after a few years of doing this, I can say with confidence that it comes at a high price, and it is not for everybody. Admittedly, I have come close to getting out of “innovation” a few times – but have continued to keep at it.

 

First issue is identifying what to work on. On an average, I consider 10 ideas to pick one to work on. These ideas come up as I talk with customers, colleagues, mentors, mentees and some times while watching TV or reading a book in a plane.  I will jot it down the soonest I can – and usually have an assortment of paper napkin sketches, notepad files etc where ideas are scattered.  I am not the only one who comes up with ideas – everyone in my team contributes ideas. Then I shortlist these based on only one criteria – is this something that can make my customer’s life easier in a tangible manner? If the answer is no – I ruthlessly cut it off.  This hurts egos more than one would think – especially my own. Some ideas that look brilliant as I jot it down in a plane ride look ridiculous when I think about it over a weekend.  And occasionally, it upsets my team when I kill one of their ideas. This needs to be done with some balance – if all you do is kill idea after idea, it just becomes a de-motivator.

 

Next up is recruiting a team to work on the idea. This is probably the hardest part – not everyone likes to do everything. And people have a life outside work, and value their work life balance. I have to respect that, and still make it work. And where I work, the team is spread across the globe – and typically we catchup over late evenings and weekends to work on innovations. No one pulls rank when it comes to innovation – people are free to join and drop off . My philosophy is that if people work on innovations voluntarily, it works out better than if it is forced down their throats based on official rank. So far it has worked out well – and I could not have asked for a better set of colleagues to work with.

 

It also improves teamwork and delegation abilities. I understood early on that delegation is the key to success. And I try to teach that to everyone in my team. The trick to delegating successfully is to make sure the team understands what is being delegated, and what is their authority and responsibility.  You cannot just delegate responsibility ! But once they are comfortable with taking on authority, and willing to be held responsible – the results are unbelievable. Irrespective of the result of the actual innovation project – they develop into amazing leaders, and it is the biggest gratification I get in my job. I did not invent this – my managers took this approach with me, and I am paying it forward for the next generation.  Some times, things don’t work out as planned and an inexperienced person might screw up. It is up to the manager to make sure there is sufficient support when failure happens, and no one is thrown under the bus.  Especially when it comes to disruptive innovation, this is key. If you cannot live with this – don’t start down this path.

 

And then there is the price to pay on family life, hobbies etc.  I had to sacrifice a lot, and so have many people I know. My wife supports me to a great extent, and without that I would not have taken this up. It is hard to balance – and once you are deep into an innovation project, it is extremely hard to switch off completely. This is rather unfair for the family, and has to be carefully weighed before starting, and then periodically throughout the project.  At the moment, the only way I handle this is to take breaks between innovation projects so that there is some balance on personal front. The work-life balance is a personal decision – and if you care enough about your team, you should watch out for their work-life balance too.  All of this needs to be factored in when you plan the project. Nothing ever works to plan, and you need to balance aggressive milestones with a dose of reality.  This is a learning process, and I am definitely in the first half.

 

Finally – disrupting the “life as usual” for a customer, or for your own company is a challenge. it does not matter if you spent 3 months working every waking hour on this project. If you cannot make a business case and SHOW things will get better, no one will accept your innovations. And then you have 2 problems -1. risk of wasting the blood, sweat and tears spent on current project, and 2.  getting investments for next project from management.  And you would have broken a lot of glass before the final solution is pitched – so there is a potential long term price to pay as well.

 

And one last thing – be prepared to take the least amount of credit for success, and maximum amount of criticism for failure.  It is easy to know if this is working or not – if it is not working, you will soon find that there is no one left working shoulder to shoulder with you any more.

 

So with this big price tag – will I do this ever again?  ABSOLUTELY ! I won’t change a thing – it is the most satisfying part of my job 🙂

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As HANA matures, where should SAP focus?


It is not news that SAP is betting the farm on HANA. SAP’s sales and marketing organizations have done a tremendous job in making sure the HANA message is delivered loud and clear to its customer base.  SAP sold more that 100M Euros worth of HANA last year , and will probably do much bigger numbers this year too.

 

BW on HANA is already out, and is touted as a killer app. It might very well be a killer app – but that remains to be seen. In our internal lab projects, it is not as smooth as we expected. It is a bumpy road – but it is definitely fast. DSO activation for example is super fast, but it will also fail inexplicably, and then the time you save in activation is lost in trying to research what went wrong. The good thing is that since we know it is very fast, despite the teething problems – I am sure lot of customers will buy it. And to a certain scale, software is sold in bundles any way – so nothing will stop SAP from selling HANA licenses. Customers actually using HANA in production is another story altogether.

 

Buying is just a first step – the bigger question is who will implement. As of now, mostly SAP PSO is doing the implementation. But that is not a scalable model at all. PSO cannot satisfy the market by themselves, and SAP should be aggressively pitching to SI partners to sell and implement BW on HANA. You get some benefit by just doing a database switch to HANA, but the real benefits come from simplification – which means redefining the datamodels and data flow.  And that takes time and expert industry knowledge , and not just technical skills.

 

SI partners are terrific at implementation, and building accelerators for implementation. However, what they are the best at is NOT building apps. For apps, it is the smaller developer’s world. But then, SAP HANA is not yet available for smaller developer to do something about productively.  SAP has made a good first step. A sandbox is available for them to play with. But it is not a full development environment they can create a product, license it and sell it in a store.

 

So on both sides – implementation and apps building, SAP has some ways to go. If they don’t get their act together in short time, next year – we will start hearing the HANA shelfware stories.

 

There has been some announcements meanwhile on HANA for SMEs that I saw a few days ago. I am not convinced how SAP is going to sell HANA to SME clients. SME is primarily a market for hosted systems – public or private.  Why would they care about the nuts and bolts of the database that their system is based on? They just expect it to be reasonably fast.  As I mentioned to few friends on twitter – not verbatim –  “If I hire a landscaper to mow my lawn, why would I care if he uses a Black and Decker electric machine, or a manual push mower?”. I don’t – I just pay the guy to mow the lawn, and will hire another one if the first one does not do a decent job.  If there are special apps that are HANA based that give me a positive top line impact, there is a case to pay a premium for HANA. Otherwise, I doubt this will fly.  Especially after companies like Workday have made their cloud offering in-memory based fully and not charging specifically for it, it is hard to ask a customer to pay a premium for modernizing an old system.

 

Once BW on HANA is out of the way, obviously SAP will come out with ECC on HANA.  With most of the heavy lifting in ECC done in ABAP layer, customers will not see any huge benefits buying HANA as a database. And it is a few hundred million lines of code – so SAP is not going to rewrite everything in ECC to work on HANA. This essentially means SAP needs to build more things like the CO-PA accelerator, and more specialty apps for ECC that needs HANA.  Which then needs the small developers and SIs to play a big role to scale it meaningfully.

 

So, will SAP make the effort and actually make it work for the small developers and SIs ? or will they try to do it all by themselves?  And while they are at it – I hope they try to make this work for mobility, cloud and everything else too.  one approach – is to stay the way it is now. SAP will try to create the market, with the hope that some day in future partners can scale it. Or they can make it work for partners and smaller developers right upfront, and build a larger momentum.

 

None of this is new to SAP – several people have already made the case to SAP on these matters. And to SAP’s credit, they are good listeners. Now the only question that remains is when they will act.

 

 

The Social Media Giveth, And The Social Media Taketh Away


If you ask me what has had the biggest impact in my life for the last few years, I will say without exception that it is social media. And I am only a minor league bench quality player in social media , compared to the stalwarts. But even then – it has changed how I live and work.  On the personal front – I won’t go to a restaurant or buy a book at an airport without checking out reviews, or asking on twitter for a quick opinion . Without facebook, I would never have kept up with what is happening in the world of competitive dog shows, which is my hobby.  On the work front – twitter is a life saver. I have lost count of how many times others have helped me find information quickly, or offered help when I tweet out a question.  It is also rather  funny that I usually never get a timely response from most of these sources if I tried on email or phone.  I blog when I get an idea that I think more than one person would like to hear – and nothing has taught me more in these past years than clarifying thoughts in my own head when I settle down in a plane ride, and open my computer to post something on my blog.

But for all that it gives, social media also has a terrific/terrible way of taking away.  When President Obama was candidate Obama in the last elections, I had seen many of my friends on Facebook supporting the campaign there, and helping with fund raising.  I was pretty impressed that his campaign was smart enough to use social media to raise so much money and awareness. And this year – I see many other friends effectively use Facebook to attack Obama’s policies, and help his rivals to raise money.

I have lived in US for about a dozen years now – and have watched with amusement how polarized people are when it comes to political ideology. Some of the smartest people I know – people who provide very balanced and well thought out opinions on work related matters, and who are polite at kid’s soccer games – they tend to make extremely biased statements with no restraint when it comes to politics. This is true for people in both left and right wings of the political spectrum. And in these 12 years, I have only seen the partisan nature increase – not decrease, both by career politicians, and by common man . Watching Facebook and twitter, I have a feeling this partisan nature has accelerated since the last election. Social media gives information so quickly, and without any editorial intervention – that it permeates faster than any other information delivery mechanism of our times.

While I was growing up in India, most people there had no idea of US election politics. We knew who the American President was, and that there were 2 parties, and that was pretty much it. Now my cousins,  nieces and nephews in India know as much about US politics as people who live here. It was quite amusing for me to hear how they view American politics strictly based on what they see on social media.

This is not just an isolated thing that affects politicians alone. I see this all the time with enterprise software world too – affecting vendors, influencers, customers etc. Some software vendors have totally embraced social media. I have seen many email signatures that read “social media leader for blah blah” as the designation of the sender. People actually get paid to manage social media, and I don’t even find it funny any more. Admittedly, I was shocked and found it funny when I first saw it – but not any more. I have accepted it for a fact that vendors want to control social media some how.

Question is – is social media giving them sufficient bang for the buck? Every one I have asked so far from vendor side assures me it is hugely beneficial to them. It is not a secret that vendors like to “buy” influence some how. Some do it with finesse – and give influencers enough information, and then get out-of-the-way on how it gets interpreted and analyzed. Some are more blunt, and will use social media as a pure marketing platform and blast out tweets, and blogs that praise themselves and say nasty things about competitors.  Some times different parts of the same company take diverse approaches when it comes to use of social media, which probably just results in erosion of  brand credibility .

But how many buyers make a decision based on social media? very few that I have seen. There are a few exceptions, but largely the purchasing process in enterprises have not followed the shift that has happened in consumer side.  But there is a silver lining too – although ultimate buyers don’t value social media all that much, there are influencers to that buying decision who make up their minds based on what they have seen in social media. I have been surprised personally when I give out my business card, and someone I have not met before would say ” Ah I recognize you from twitter and your blog”. It has occasionally also helped me win business. So may be it is just a matter of time before social media becomes a big criteria for enterprise purchases . But at least for now and for near future, more weight is still given to quality of the product, price, references etc.

I am yet to see a CXO who told me ” I am impressed that you guys refuted your competitors’ mean comments in your sponsored blog. I am now convinced I should buy from you, let me cut a check for perpetual licenses. Looking forward to more content like this”.  But what I have seen is CIOs and others calling me and asking ” hey, my team just pointed this flurry of activity to me from this company. Why do you think these guys are suddenly saying all this stuff about the other guys? What are they really afraid of ?  Should I be worried?”.  In my mind – it is a  perfect example of social media back firing , despite good intentions.

Social media is a fantastic opportunity to listen to your ecosystem, as long as you also follow-up with some action.  Then you can use social media to point out the actions that you took.  Of course, you can also use it mostly as a platform to shout from – but then you carry the risk of your ecosystem tuning you out quickly.  Even before social media existed, it was not possible to get a second chance create a great first impression. With social media, it is next to impossible. People form opinions really quickly based on what you do in social media. If you mess up – it will be hard to earn back the trust.  It is a hard balance to strike, but now that the pundits have social media maturity models and best practices, I suppose this is all well covered.