Can Enterprise Widgets Simplify the life of our Defense users?
Over the last few weeks I have been debating in my mind on what topic to first Blog about. One thing was clear, I want to engage you, the defense community, in a dialogue and hopefully spark an atmosphere of collaboration. As Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams have stated in their new book titled Wikinomics , foster a “marketplace for ideas, innovations, and uniquely qualified minds”. On that note, I would like to share with you some thoughts on how we, the Business Process Experts, could make the lives of our users simpler.
I turn the clock back a few years and recall my life as a maintenance officer in an infantry unit and being constantly asked by either the Commanding Officer, key unit personnel and even sometimes by soldiers what the status of vehicle X was, when equipment Y would be ready, and so on. Whenever I left my office and knew that I would run into “interested” members of the unit, I would jot down on a piece of paper the status of the various equipments that I would most likely be asked about. I was armed and equipped with the very basic information in case I would hear these infamous questions.
Today, people are still interested in the status of their equipment. Which equipment is on their mind varies from day to day depending on what is going on in the unit at the time. Frequent readers of SDN will agree with me that widgets are a current hot topic. Dennis Moore described that “Widgets are "helper applications" -- mini-applications that allow the user to monitor or interact with an application without needing to launch the full application.” (Widgets for the Enterprise ). In his blog, Eric Wood described the attributes of successful enterprise widgets (Attributes of Successful Enterprise Widgets). These attributes hit home when I reflected on the example I described earlier. I can certainly imagine a simple widget where an interested user would subscribe to the status of one or more equipments. The widget would periodically poll the SAP back end and display the status in a simple and elegant fashion. The user could remove equipments being monitored when ever they no longer wish to do so. Perhaps something like this…
I suspect that such a widget would have mass appeal. I certainly wish I had something like this back then to make my life easier and the fellow members of my unit.
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