Helping customers innovate
Dennis Howlett pointed me to Thomas Otter who has an funny post about innovation going on among the SAP customer base. This is an interesting take on building a user community out of business software users (the SDN, that is), but where are the success stories? Building a mouse out of the Wiimote and interfacing to a SAP application through Ruby on Rails certainly speaks to my geek self, but does it really help bring Colgate Palmolive’s business forward?
Go read the article, and watch the video. It is cool to use the Wiimote like this (although I wouldn’t say its a UI revolution). I want my Wii!
Michael Koch have some good points in the comments over at Otter’s, but I don’t agree with his point of view on why companies shy away from too much [SAP development] innovation. I take a different stance on this subject:
And so it goes. As business solution providers, it is our task to innovate, not to create a platform and outsource the innovation. I would much rather give our customers a well equipped conference center with projectors, seats, videoconferencing… rather than a hammer, nailgun and some concrete to let them build their own.
