Okay, this blog has nothing to do with the US Census.
It's been just a week since we (ASUG, with the help of VNSG, SAUG, and DSAG) released a survey for those of you who develop, maintain, and administer SAP Business Workflow.
I've taken some screen shots of the preliminary survey, and I wanted to whet your appetites for the full results.
First off, the industries that are represented by respondents:
I think this is pretty interesting for a number of reasons. The highest percentage of industries represented here are 'Manufacturing' (second only to 'Other'). I am curious about which workflow scenarios they have implemented? Are they industry-specific scenarios - or the more common procurement, HR, CRM scenarios? IT Software companies come in next (since 'Other' will be disclosed at a later date). What are these companies using Workflow for? Are they partners developing workflow applications? Are they using workflow to optimize their own business processes?
Most interesting is the breadth of industries who use workflow. Those that were not represented by a specific selection button on the survey are certainly captured in the 'Other' write-in field. But it shows that workflow crosses those industry boundaries as surely as it crosses application boundaries within SAP.
Okay, so the question was: Are you or others at your company active in the SCN Network? It's great that 80% said yes. It shows we have a great audience, and yet, if the rest of the respondents are not visiting SCN (or their local user groups) for info - where are they getting it? And there's more than 'just' information on SCN too, considering we've recently passed the mark.yolton/blog/2010/03/03/it146s-official-sap-community-2000000-strong! This is not meant to be a criticism of those who do not visit SCN for forums, blogs, and wikis - it's an honest question...where are those other sources of info hiding out?
This is pretty cool too. Of those who have already responded to this survey, by far most of them are active in the SCN forums. This is to be expected, that is the primary place to go in order to get your questions answered, and to answer those of others. A lot of people enjoy Webcasts as a way of getting information, which is great too, since many travel budgets are constrained. And the bloggers (or blog-readers) should pat themselves on the back too. They are either writing about their passions, or reading (and hopefully contributing) too.
Next - How important is Workflow to your company's core business practice?
Roughly too thirds of the respondents characterized workflow either as Critical, or as Very Important to their core business practices. I can personally vouch for this; if we did not have workflow to route some of our business processes, we would probably grind to a halt. Or, if not that, then something close to it.
Obviously, there is a lot more to this survey than what has been presented here. The survey is still open to all SAP workflow developers and administrators. Functional folks? Well, we know you all have opinions too, so please feel free to share them too.
Again, I would like to encourage people to click the link above, and submit a thoughtful survey response. The write-in answers will probably be the most illuminating. We would like to know more about you and your Workflow experiences. As noted previously, the full survey results will be shared, via ASUG and SCN. But really, have you been counted?
Best regards,
Sue
