I am excited about attending Innovation Weekend in Las Vegas. This is going to be real fun. It appears I would learn a lot in about 30 hours. In addition, I would get to meet several interesting people. This idea-Innovation Weekend-is just great. Whoever came up with this idea of hosting an Innovation Weekend just before TechEd deserves the "think-outside-the-box" award. I am looking forward to attending IW and TechEd '10.
I see a lot of information on IW in sdn.sap.com. Blogs, recordings, wiki pages etc. The amount of information generated by a few motivated, dedicated, devoted individuals in less than a couple of weeks is just amazing. I am really blessed to be working on SAP technologies surrounded by people like IW team and others. Just because of people like you, the technology - 25+ years after college graduation - still exhilarates me. I stay young as a result. Thank you, SAP!
Now let me discuss other thoughts on IW. I reviewed wiki pages and two recordings of online meetups as thoroughly as possible. I found one common factor in first 5 business cases: lack of data. This doesn't mean we don't have data. We've plenty of data; however we haven't taken adequate steps to manage that data and as a result, we don't have actionable information.
Surprisingly instead of discussing ways and means of converting data into actionable information, it seems we go-off on a tangent by offering a solution to a problem not well defined. I mean the sixth business case Social Media Integration(SMI) sounds like a solution to a problem not well-understood and/or well-defined. "Go where the people are" - is this something really new? 10-15 years ago, I used to receive several tele-marketing calls. A few of them used to come from non-profit organizations. Then with the advent of internet and email technologies, their strategy changed. They used new technologies(email) to "Go where the people are". Now social media sites are popular so people want to employ new technologies to implement old strategies.
Unfortunately I try to be very careful when I decide to contribute to non-profit organizations. In the past, I've made a few contributions to tele-marketing calls I received. As a result, I started receiving several more calls than I was receiving before. It appears the organizations who benefited by my contribution sold my information to other tele-marketers. So other tele-marketers followed a slightly modified strategy "Go where the people who give are"(their organizations could've taken a little time to analyze and understand what made me give to other organization. Instead they wanted to take a short-cut by modifying the strategy "Go where the people who give are"). After learning the lesson that more contributions would only keep me busy 24x7 answering tele-marketers, I've stopped making contributions online or over phone. These days I'm really very careful.
What surprises me is that there are a lot of discussions on SMI than other business cases. Why we even IT professionals don't want to discuss the challenges. Without discussing the challenges, how are we going to come up with a solution.
On the one hand, I'm really happy to see five business cases discussing the challenges in improving the availability of data. On the other hand, I am a bit disappointed to see a lot of focus and discussions on implementing old strategies.
