25.11.2009

SAP UKI User Group: How Innovative Is SAP?

By: Christoph Zeidler

IT must add value

Chakib Bouhdary from SAP was a guest speaker at the SAP UKI User Group event for the first time. As chief value officer for SAP, it was no surprise that he addressed the topic of value. What is value? Who creates it? Who is responsible for it in a company? The answer was clear: IT is an important player, which – according to Bouhdary – keeps the wheels of business turning. From shared services and optimization of the value chain to integrating new technologies, “without IT, there is no innovation,” he explained.

“And who understands the processes across the areas of a company better than the CIO?” Bouhdary asked. The world is developing at a tearing pace, he added, and IT must understand such changes, take them seriously, and provide the technology for them. Companies that integrate new trends in their business model will emerge from the global financial crisis as winners. “It’s not enough to just cut costs. You don’t get to be successful by making savings,” he said.

SaaS and cloudsourcing on the rise

R “Ray” Wang, analyst and partner with Altimeter Group, has had a finger on the pulse of the IT industry for many years and named some of the latest trends. “Companies that aren’t open to new ideas will ultimately lose,” he said – and claimed this can start with small things like Twitter: “Twitter has a tremendously wide impact. You should all tweet, because if you don’t, your competitors will.” But of course, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Companies need to integrate social media elements with their corporate strategy, thus linking IT with people within and outside the company. They need to profit from “the wisdom of the masses” – in other words cloudsourcing or crowdsourcing. “The future is up in a cloud, in software as a service. In the long term, no one will need to run large solutions on site themselves,” Wang said. Mission-critical processes will be operated by companies themselves, with everything else farmed out, Wang predicted.

According to Wang, technology is changing so quickly that CIOs are no longer in a position to dictate what is done, but rather are led by the market. “Change is the only constant,” he said. Technology now dates faster than ever and CIOs must be pioneers of change, instead of clinging on to outdated technology.

Next Page: How innovative is SAP?

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