The ‘Co’s – Cooperation, Collaboration, Communities, as well and especially Co-Innovation - have been broadly embraced by the IT industry. Correlated concepts, particularly Web 2.0, pervade the general media and predominantly the omnipresent internet. Blogs, podcasts and articles feature today’s ‘Co’s and typically shed light in the space of technology, tools and techniques.
Motivation
This making-of-series is now something special, dedicated to glance behind the standard, technical curtain. It is, above all, about people: Real people in real organizations and how these people get together to perform these ‘Co’s. You’ll be introduced to a series of blogs surrounding today’s real life and how latter concepts have changed the way organizations, particularly their representatives, do business together, based on a genuine experience derived from the activities within SAP’s Community Advisory Group Methodology (CAGM). Yet, before jumping ahead into the real storyline, we should stop for a second and get a clear understanding of what these terms refer to and hence embrace the broader context.
Introduction
Enterprise Services Communities were launched in Q1 2006 as part of SAP's commitment to eSOA. ESCs form a co-innovation working environment - a forum for partners, customers and universities to define business processes, enterprise services and best practices with SAP that directly influence and prioritize the enterprise services (ES) definitions, as well as strategic directions or advices from SAP. ES Communities are clustered into two broader categories. On the one hand side, Community Definition Groups (CDG) focusing on providing community members the opportunity to work directly with SAP in defining ES for the SAP Platform and on the other side, Community Advisory Groups (CAG) focused on providing the community members with the opportunity to work directly with SAP to create best practices for the community and ideally the industry in general. The context of this “making-of-series” is, as mentioned, embedded in the Advisory Group Methodology led by Peter Emmel and supported by myself: One of the very first ESCs and precursor CAG. In brief: A broad variety of partners, customers and universities mutually engaged in early roundtables and working streams to address the innately ambiguous and topical area of (e)SOA Methodology, to collaboratively create best practices (Details to come in further blogs).
By today, the Methodology group has many siblings, such as groups for Networking Services, Virtualization and Composition Platform with great results. This series is anyhow focused on the Methodology group, as it stands from a conceptual point of view apart and bears valuable and interesting insights into the space of mutual collaboration.
More information on the other groups can be found here:
- rudolf.held/blog/2007/07/06/let-partners-ce-%CE%B2
The series continous here: Community Advisory Group Methodology (CAGM) - Part II: Lessons Learned (by Peter Emmel)