Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Sameer Patel, Senior VP and GM – Enterprise Social and Collaborative Software, SAP (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: In the example that you gave us about training, you talked about crowd sourcing through videos of enterprise tips and knowledge. That’s essentially the use skills that you described. It sounds like the real power of the system that you are trying to develop is both providing the employees and the enterprise the tools with which to both record and develop small nuggets of knowledge and then, making that searchable for the ones who are trying to find that knowledge. Is that a correct observation?

Sameer Patel: That’s absolutely correct.

Sramana Mitra: Your view of the training and knowledge management in this case is more the structure of how to crowd source knowledge and then the structure of how employees find that knowledge at the point of consumption.

Sameer Patel: Exactly. You said it really well. There’s also a third element here. One is the ability to use mobile devices or any media that’s pertinent and appropriate for that particular instance. If it’s something at a factory floor and a two-minute video really helps, or it’s one of these field service people climbing up a pole to fix an antenna, what are the things that you can share? The second is like what you said, making it available as part of the knowledge base. But there’s a third piece which brings it to full circle which is what we are very focused on and allows me to get into what we call this notion of work patterns. What we mean by work patterns is, what is every single employee doing? They’re doing three or four things, generally, on a regular basis. If I’m in Sales, one pattern is looking after customers and keeping them happy. The second pattern is selling more to them. Our third pattern is constantly learning and being enabled on new products and services.

We have redone a massive change. A new update SAP Jam, which will come out at the end of this week, is around this notion of predefined work patterns that might apply to you based on your role. For example, if it’s learning and we know that you are a sales person selling products in this category. We now have the ability to serve up the knowledge that somebody else shared in the context of the work you’re doing. If you’re about to get into a new opportunity and sell to a new customer, say in the Midwest in utilities, what are the things that exist in the learning database that we can put into this work pattern on this template that says, “By the way, it sounds like you’re going after this opportunity. Here are nine videos that people who have been selling into the space for 10 years have been doing.”

Why is it so difficult inside organizations to make that simple connection? It’s been difficult because the systems that collect the data and present the data have been very different and what we’re doing with Jam is making it that one unified system that knows the business context because we have application access like CRM that tells me what you’re doing. Second, it knows all of the learning nuggets that exist and it can make that connection between what might be valuable here. Third, because it’s the same Jam. It’s centered on how you work. It’s not some little social learning in a CRM social system; that does not bring the whole picture together.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Sameer Patel, Senior VP and GM – Enterprise Social and Collaborative Software, SAP
1 2 3 4 5 6 7