Knowledge Sharing across the Globe - Part 2: How Does the SAP AppHaus EA Community Collaborate?

[Priscilla_D]

Welcome to "Knowledge Sharing across the Globe," a blog post series dedicated to unraveling insights into the SAP AppHaus Network enterprise architecture (EA) community. In this series, we embark on a journey of discovery, exploring how this community serves as a hub of innovation, collaboration, and knowledge exchange.

Part 2: ”To Drive Business Innovation, It Takes a Community not Just an Architect” 

In today's rapidly changing and competitive business landscape, driving innovation requires an entire community of individuals with diverse skills and perspectives, who work together collaboratively and share knowledge to help one another. The second part of this knowledge sharing blog series explores the importance of a collaborative approach to drive business innovation and highlights how the SAP AppHaus Network enterprise architecture (EA) community fosters a culture of creativity, experimentation, and forward-thinking. In an interview, the community lead Peter Kaiser shares insights. 

Peter, how do you foster collaboration among the different partners within the community? 

Active collaboration maximizes the effectiveness of the community. And we do that by always looking for volunteers who share demos of latest trends, newest technologies, or innovative ideas that other partners can listen to, learn, and be inspired. This creates an environment that encourages the exchange of ideas and strengthens the bonds among different partners globally within the SAP AppHaus Network EA community. And it does not stop being an inspiration. First collaborations show that we are already reaching the next level with partners who have started to jointly develop an application that will benefit from their complementing competencies. 

How do you encourage continuous learning and professional development within the community? 

We do this in four different ways:  

1. by highlighting the latest trends from SAP in our meetings (e.g. demoing the latest technology by dedicated SAP experts), and by 
2. providing information on newest topics that may be of interest for partners in the community,  
3. providing interesting courses, articles and blog posts that can enable self-learning and improve their professional development, 
4. additionally, we foster open discussions that can enable partners to also share what they have worked on, feedback and suggestions for others to try. 

What is some partner feedback of the community? 

With 14 sessions in 2023, we can proudly say that everyone was happy with the diverse topics we discussed, the more so when we look at the sudden boost of Gen AI. I also think that what the participants really liked and appreciated was the opportunity to see what other partners are doing, when they showed their latest developments, shared issues they were facing, troubleshooting options, and discussed some major impacts and feedback in our expert round. It was also much appreciated to learn what SAP is doing in these innovative technology fields to form their own opinions on that and learn from them. 

The quote from Kristof Cappellen, SAP AppHaus Network partner Flexso, summarizes it best:

“To drive business innovation it takes a community not just an architect.” 

As the community leader, what are you looking forward to regarding the community's future? 

I am looking forward to more growth in the community, having more interesting sessions and inviting more internal and external experts to share their experiences with the SAP AppHaus Network partners. This will allow the community to continuously collaborate, learn and discuss alternative methodologies to encourage efficient information and experience exchange. In the end, it is about further improving our services for our customers.

Ready to learn more about the remarkable capabilities and potential of Gen AI to our partners? Stay tuned for Part 3 to get some insights into what is being shared in the community calls so far! 

You can also check out the Gen AI Explore Workshop offered by the SAP AppHaus to help identify business challenges and opportunities that can be addressed and solved with the help of Gen AI.

Did you miss Part 1 of the Knowledge Sharing series? Check it out!

 Contact: 

Dr. Peter Kaiser 

Enterprise Architecture Community Lead

SAP AppHaus 

peter.kaiser@sap.com 

Contact: 

Priscilla Darfour

Working Student, Coordination & Communication Support

SAP AppHaus 

priscilla.darfour@sap.com 

[TobiA]

Thanks for starting this community. 

The following feedback I provided using the SAP AppHaus feedback feature but received no reply yet. Hoping the community will be a better place for it:

1. The AppHaus web site lacks change notifications feature, such as additions or modifications to the methodology, recommended paths and methods are not communicated in a traceable way.

2. At my customers, I champion the SAP AppHaus methodology to complement the SAP Activate methodology. My recommendations on this is based on my own experience with SAP and IBM Garage and IBM Enterprise Design Thinking. However, I don’t see anything from SAP , on how SAP or its partners are recommending to their customers in how these two methodologies complement each others.

3. The User Story Mapping workshop is mentioned in the innovation toolkit but no details about it are published yet. So I end up referring to MVP Workshop from IBM Garage. When is SAP AppHaus going to publish it? 

4. The Run & Scale phase has no methods. Again I refer either to SAP Activate and IBM Garage MVP Scale workshop to design a similar one to my SAP Customers. When will SAP AppHaus publish design thinking workshops for MVPs be it for the build or run of them?

5. SAP is accelerating SAP Activate with SAP SIGNAVIO and SAP LeanIx. One powerful example is the User Journer Modeler - Analytics which are essentially design thinking tools to model UX journey and ensure continuous improvements based on collected data from actual usage! When will SAP AppHaus get involved with these innovations especially for customers who invest in these two products from SAP? It will important to have a holistic overview and discussion regarding LeanIX, SAP SIGNAVIO and their roles in accelerating rapid prototyping and MVP builds.

6. SAP AppHaus mission is for a desirable, feasible, viable solutions to be innovated. Do you consider the current feedback functionality on your web site to be desirable? When I used it, I got no indication of that my message was sent, and no email recognizing that you received something from me? Is this an indication that SAP is moving away from it toward SAP Community / Git hub type of site?

thanks for your understanding and feedback. Hope you see my feedback to help improve this area for our customers !

[TobiA]

Thanks for starting this community. 

The following feedback I provided using the SAP AppHaus feedback feature but received no reply yet. Hoping the community will be a better place for it:

1. The AppHaus web site lacks change notifications feature, such as additions or modifications to the methodology, recommended paths and methods are not communicated in a traceable way.

2. At my customers, I champion the SAP AppHaus methodology to complement the SAP Activate methodology. My recommendations on this is based on my own experience with SAP and IBM Garage and IBM Enterprise Design Thinking. However, I don’t see anything from SAP , on how SAP or its partners are recommending to their customers in how these two methodologies complement each others.

3. The User Story Mapping workshop is mentioned in the innovation toolkit but no details about it are published yet. So I end up referring to MVP Workshop from IBM Garage. When is SAP AppHaus going to publish it? 

4. The Run & Scale phase has no methods. Again I refer either to SAP Activate and IBM Garage MVP Scale workshop to design a similar one to my SAP Customers. When will SAP AppHaus publish design thinking workshops for MVPs be it for the build or run of them?

5. SAP is accelerating SAP Activate with SAP SIGNAVIO and SAP LeanIx. One powerful example is the User Journer Modeler - Analytics which are essentially design thinking tools to model UX journey and ensure continuous improvements based on collected data from actual usage! When will SAP AppHaus get involved with these innovations especially for customers who invest in these two products from SAP? It will important to have a holistic overview and discussion regarding LeanIX, SAP SIGNAVIO and their roles in accelerating rapid prototyping and MVP builds.

6. SAP AppHaus mission is for a desirable, feasible, viable solutions to be innovated. Do you consider the current feedback functionality on your web site to be desirable? When I used it, I got no indication of that my message was sent, and no email recognizing that you received something from me? Is this an indication that SAP is moving away from it toward SAP Community / Git hub type of site?

thanks for your understanding and feedback. Hope you see my feedback objective is to help improve this area for our customers !

[Priscilla_D]

Thanks so much for your detailed feedback, @TobiA!

We appreciate that you have taken your time to give us details on your experiences and views. And we very much regret that one of the offered feedback channels did not work for you. Your input will certainly serve as a source for improvement, rest assured.

Now, to start working together, please help us improve and be so kind to send your email address or other contact details to our SAP AppHaus email address apphaus@sap.com. That way we will be able to involve the right colleagues and start a collaborative and constructive dialogue between you and the AppHaus team.

Again, thanks a lot and all the best!

[TobiA]

Thanks Priscilla for reaching back. Since you provided the email address of Dr. Peter Kaiser, I already emailed him last week. I also just sent an email to apphaus@sap.com as per your instructions, hoping that this time around I hear back from them.

again thank you , it is much appreciated.

regards,

Tobi