Most of you probably have read my manger's (Mark Yolton's) blog about us hitting the 1M member mark. SAP Community Network Reaches One Million Members!
But the more important aspect of this is that it all happened because of you. Yes you, the single you, not the multiple of multiples, but individuals like yourself that felt they wanted to become part, keep themselves updated about and get involved with our communities SDN and BPX.
BPX is now a little bit over a year old and we had a stellar year in terms of building a solid foundation for the future. We added 13 industry forum areas and 8 new horizontal areas. We added tools like Gliffy, updated the blogging system with a wizy wig, we are updating our own backend systems with integration into SAP backend systems, so that for instance the solution maps now get rendered inside our BPX framework ( little steps, can lead to giant ones ) and we tried to better understand what our BPX audience needs and wants.
Granted we are still at the inception point, and only in the early stages of building up our community, I do understand that we have ways to go before the BPX community will be as impactful to our customers, partners and SAP as SDN, but with thought leaders like Paul Harmon, Bruce Silver, Ginger Gatling and Jon Reed, being part of our community and writing collectively good articles, blogs and whitepapers, we do show traction in the BPM market and are trying to pave the way for SAP's eSOA adoption.
Where we are today and where we want to go: Today BPX is still more or less a stand alone community, although it is an increasingly strong asset in the overall ecosystem and aligns with our industry strategy with more than 250,000 members today, there is still only a loosely couples connection and awareness of what our community can do. In 2008 we will increasingly focus on showing value, creating more avenues for our community to easily create and acitively participate and closely align with programs like that of ASUG, utilizing our partners and our customers experiences.
We really want to continue building up a central business process repository and a community around sharing business process maps,best practices and business process modeling learning. In the end our goal is to drive customer success. What I mean with that customers can extract benefits from our BPX community, lower costs of solution development, increased adoption, better service by SAP, collective co-innovation with our partners and the SAP solution managers on our platform
In order to get to such a state my hope is that we can work on several different prongs of our community:
Active contribution: I really would like to see more of you starting to share business process related information more often and without fear. I wrote another blog about what you can share and what is easy to share and if you are not sure, just reach out to our moderators or BPX evangelists or me.
We wil continue to build ou our footprint and add more horizontal areas such as HR or ERP and industry specific forums, such as banking and high tech in 2008.
We also wil continue to build out our web2.0 collaborative technologies to share knowledge on our platform. This way we empower you to share more often. In addtion we continue to seek alignment with outside communities such as DSUG, ASUG, and you will see a whole BPX day dedicated to our community and the role during Sapphire and TechEd this coming year.
Well hopefully you all will have a happy holidays and I wish you all a wonderful happy new year. Hope to see and talk to you all next year. Lets rock in 2008
Marco
