Hello everyone!

We are excited to be working to support the Google Wave Federation Protocol in SAP StreamWork to let tools – collaboration or business – work seamlessly between any wave server, including Google Wave!  With SAP StreamWork, we help business be more productive by letting people drive decisions together.  Since our first BETA announcement a number of months ago we have been constantly compared to Google Wave, due to the real-time characteristics of the collaboration patterns we use. While products each have a  different focus, they are also naturally complementary, and from the moment we saw Google Wave we were excited about the possibilities of connecting the two. This year’s Google I/O is our first opportunity to tell the story of how we plan to work collaboratively with Google, the Wave Federation Protocol, and OpenSocial.

For those of you who are not familiar with SAP StreamWork, it is aimed at transforming the way people work. When Google developed Google Wave it asked the question, “What would e-mail, instant messenger, and collaborative document creation look like if it were invented in the 21st century?” Similarly, SAP asked the question, “How can people solve important business decisions in a natural, fluid way, making every day more effective and fun?”. SAP StreamWork is a new on-demand, collaborative decision-making application that brings together people inside or outside your organization with information for fact-based decision-making and interactive business tools for collecting feedback, strategizing, and brainstorming, and is available today in a free version for anyone.  It is also fully extensible by developers using open REST APIs. in a business context

Many of you make decisions every day, using a range of tools, from e-mail, to white boards, to shouting matches, to business applications and business intelligence.  We get the work done, but it often becomes chaotic and hard to follow and can hinder clear decisions.  Wave is modernizing collaborative communication; SAP is modernizing business. SAP StreamWork brings together people, information and proven business methodologies to help teams naturally and fluidly work toward goals and outcomes. Teams can assess situations together, develop strategies and make clear decisions, with a full record of what transpired. What better idea than to include anyone with a wave account?

So this is how we see you rolling in the near future: A supplier just notified you they couldn’t deliver materials that you need tomorrow to continue production.  Crap!  You bring that context fluidly into SAP StreamWork and assemble a team, bringing experts in that industry to see who might have capacity.  Some of the people you know are registered as Google Wave users – instead of having to enter a different system, the business discussion complete with analytical and business tools show up in their wave inbox.  It no longer matters where people are, or what tools they prefer – they can safely make decisions, in real-time, and directly drive the business applications that run the largest companies in the world.  Now that feels like an improvement, yeah?

At this year’s Google I/O we will show the beginnings of this.  But, what exactly, are we talking about?

Passing the Wave (Wave Federation):

At I/O we plan to show how SAP StreamWork has added a Wave Server to the platform to enable conversations between SAP StreamWork and other Wave servers. In SAP StreamWork a user starts an Activity where in they invite other participants to collaborate with them on a work activity like making a business decision. The group can then add the data and tools to guide them through the decision process. When an activity is created, StreamWork creates a new wave and federates the content of that Activity to the Wave server of any Wave users that may have been invited to that activity. With this integration Wave users will be able to seamlessly collaborate with SAP StreamWork users to work on the important decisions they need to make every day.

Go Go Gadget! (Gadget / Method Interoperability):

In order to ensure that content from an Activity or wave is properly federated between each other, we had to ensure that the content found in both systems was compatible with each other, and this included Wave Gadgets and StreamWork Methods. Wave Gadgets are shared programs that run inside waves, and are very comparable to StreamWork Methods which are business tools that run inside StreamWork Activities. Theproof of concept will show the compatibility between a StreamWork business method being federated over to  Google Wave. We intend to create a generic compatibility between StreamWork Methods, and Wave and OpenSocial Gadgets so that developers will be able to ensure that gadgets or methods built for one system will work in the other.

These are the early days with our Wave Federation Protocol support and we are still in proof of concept stage, but we are excited to discover together with you how Wave, OpenSocial and StreamWork naturally extend each other, and we intend to deliver value to our customers, based on this work, within the next year. So please let us know your ideas, and we can figure out how the make the world a little more productive every day.

-David Meyer, SAP

In Torture, Plain and Simple, Suzanne points out that while it is true that torture doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter: it’s illegal.  But let’s dwell for a minute on the first point: torture doesn’t work.

Elaine Scarry gave this subject a scholar’s attention in The Body in Pain, where she explained that pain nullifies the world around us — with extreme pain nothing exists but the pain.  This deconstructs the ego to a point where conversation is meaningless and information extracted in this state has one goal: to make the pain stop.  Say anything to make the pain stop.  In fact, there is a long history of torture being used to extract misinformation to support campaigns of misinformation.

While this simple fact is well established in research, it seems appallingly under communicated.  If it was well communicated, I imagine it would lead to this:

Interrogator 1: Should we do it?

Interrogator 2: Well, it doesn’t work.

Interrogator 1: OK then, let’s not bother.

The complex ethics simply disappear.

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So I have blogged before about Polestar - an intuitive UI for browsing and exploring information that as one deployment option can be directly accessed on the Internet at http://polestar.ondemand.com

Internally, the labs team continue to innovate this offering in interesting ways. One way has been to add an API that allows applications, pages and tools to push prepared data to Polestar and embed the cloud based solution into their products. Which is interesting, but not as interesting at the amazing things that start to happen once that API happens.

For example, one internal team created this video of an internal test showing that Polestar could be embedded into a classic SAP applications.

This is just someone playing with an idea at this point (so don’t look for this built into your SAP applications just yet), but it really demonstrates the power of an API to generate the unexpected. Hopefully we will see lots more innovative uses of these API.

Timo Elliott recently posted on a new capability available from our Labs team - Polestar. It seems that his use of a hockey example has become a theme. Another colleague of mine noted that the co-founder of SAP Hasso Plattner owns a stake in the San Jose Sharks. So he produce a brief analysis using Polestar about the performance of the Sharks under various leadership:

What is really interesting is that the data set is only 16 rows pulled from a website, yet you can quickly glean really interesting facts and trends. Thank you Fredrick - great video. As a Brit living in Canada, it seems I am doomed to hear about Hockey all the time. Clearly, I need to go and get some Rugby data and produce the next example myself.

Also, here is the spreadsheet so you can try this your self at http://polestar.ondemand.com

My good friend Donald MacCormick sent me this little video outlining how he used Polestar to review the partners that attended our recent conference. I thought it worth sharing:

The report’s authors state that good decision-making needs:

1. High-quality data
2. Access to advanced systems and training
3. Sound judgment
4. Trust
5. Flexibility

My colleague Timo also blogged on this some time ago - here.

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How often have you heard someone say “We need to be making fact-based decisions” as apposed to “Gut-feel based decisions”

Timo Elliott a colleague of mine has this to say:

It’s one of our core beliefs that decisions made on data are better, of course Scott Adams has a slightly alternate take on that…

Before we can really start to assess whether facts assist us in making decisions, we need to be able to achieve a few other things. The very first thing is we need to find the facts. And given that Butler Group state:

“a number of surveys have concluded that an information-based worker is spending between one and 20 hours each week searching for information”

It appears were spending a lot of time collecting information. Anything we can do to reduce the time spent looking for information and increase the time spent looking at information would seem to be important to getting better decisions faster.

And that is the project I have been working on for a while - BUSINESSSOBJECTS POLESTAR. How to get from “I have a question” to “Here is some useful data” as fast as possible - and to make that accessible and usable by anyone.

“Polestar combines the simplicity of search with the power of BI to offer an iTunes-like interface that will appeal to a currently under-served segment of BI users.” - Cindi Howson, Founder BI Scorecard