Production Blog Reviews

Interesting application of SNA re: collaboration, transparency, etc. 

SAP Innovation: Social Networking at the Service of the French Public Sector | SAP Web 2.0

Alexis Naibo of the SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center gave a demonstration of the SNA technology, explaining how it can import data from a wide variety of sources including internal business applications, corporate databases, and external interfaces. Once the data has been gathered, people can search for experts and discover relationships using an intuitive interface.

Today’s organizations are increasingly complex, with frequent reorganizations and many cross-functional teams and initiatives. The result is that the standard corporate hierarchy, which is often the only relationship information available, rarely reflects how people really work together. Many people today are active members of professional social networks such as LinkedIn or Viadeo, and want it to be as easy to find an internal contact as it is externally.

SNA has the potential to gives a more complete, 360 degree view of collaboration in the organization, leveraging the knowledge already embedded in corporate applications such as human capital management, customer relationship management, and project management systems.

The prototype makes it easy to understand existing relationships between people in much the same way that traditional business intelligence systems help organizations understand data stored in their corporate systems.

Unlike consumer-oriented social network tools that only support one type of relationship between individuals (“I know X”) and a limited, predefined collection of data attributes, SNA supports multiple different types of relationships between both individuals and groups, and organizations can easily adapt and extend the information and links contained in each individual’s profile.

Anything technology that touches on relationships between people requires sensitive handling, and SNA is designed to meet all the technical, legal, and organizational requirements for data security and governance, by incorporating fine-grained control over information access. In addition, the platform is designed to fit seamlessly into existing environments, supporting standards such LDAP and Google’s OpenSocial, and with integration to mobile devices and corporate email accounts.

Alexis explained that the prototype has been implemented as a beta project within SAP and has proved very popular with employees. As a standard part of the internal company portal, all SAP’s approximately 50,000 staff have access to the solution, and it is used thousands of times each week.

An open SNA demonstration is available online for anybody would like to understand the technology, at http://sna-demo.ondemand.com

SAP is still investigating how best to package and commercialize the SNA prototype, but there has been considerable interest from potential customers, notably as a seamless part of specific SAP business vertical and functional applications.

SAP Innovation: Social Networking at the Service of the French Public Sector | SAP Web 2.0

Demonstration Site:

Social Network Analyzer demo

Welcome to the Social Network Analyzer demo site

Social Network Analyzer aggregates existing enterprise data to display and discover organizational relationships. It automatically generates useful social networks that can be used:

• to find and connect people,
• to take actions based on individual/organization/company information,
• to send an email, meeting request or call a person,
• to build the right team,
• to better manage and control processes,
• to understand the relationships between suppliers and buyers,
• to analyze people’s information and organization using BI tools,
• to integrate social network information inside any application...

Social Network Analyzer enables stronger collaboration capabilities, more trust and better decision contexts!

Social Network Analyzer demo