AboutUI

A very nice, understanding and God fearing friend

A Funny spam email I got through SDN:

Hello dearest one,
how are you doing? i hope you are fine my name is Zenab Benson single girl never married before,i got your e-mail address on (sdn.sap.com) You have an interesting profile there.i am writing you because i believe one can find a very nice, understanding and God fearing friend in this social network created for responsible people like you.i hope to hear from you so that i can tell you more about my self with love and trust and as well give you my photo,please kindly reply me back with so that i can tell you more about my self and also for further conversation. I will be waiting for your mail soon
My regards to your family.
your faithfully
Zenab

I think my friends from SCN would really like its portrayal as a “Social Network Created for Responsible People Like You”

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Your Product is Flashy! Its Sexy!

As usual – The good Dilbert’s are the ones which hurt the most…

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Where is the next generation of SAPpies coming from?

Yesterday I went to the Google Chrome Event (Chrome D3vF3st, a.k.a. #ChromeIL). It was a very geeky event, aimed at chrome developers and Google aficionados. It wasnt as high profiled as the Google GarageGeeks event which had the country’s twiterrati flock to (barely) hear Marissa Mayer, but it was crowded, fast paced and educating. More than that – it was free. Besides from being free, you had a lot of high-school(?) students, college kids and people who generally have not seriously began shaving jotting down notes.

I looked around and told myself – this is how you win the hearts and minds of young developers to flock around *your* products, *your* technology.  Ballmer got it first, with his famous “Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers”. Is SAP getting it? I mean, TechEd is an amazing event, not to mention SAP Inside Track (soon in Israel). But are we doing enough to reach high-school kids? College Kids?

Israel has the largest percentage of engineers and scientist per capita. It has the most companies registered at NASDAQ (after the US itself). How many of these startups are around enterprise products? very few.

I dont have any conclusions (except that the Google cupcakes look great but taste awful) yet. I do think its the responsibility of the SAP community in general and especially in the the 972 dial code to start addressing these issues.

(originally posted on SDN)

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The Right User Interface for the right person

During this week’s trip to the BI/Portals Conference in Orlando, I was trying out “Vikido”. Vikido is nice application enabling kids to have their own “mailbox” containing video messages sent to them by their friends. So every morning and every evening I would sit down in front of my laptop and record a message to each kid. They would click on a shortcut on the desktop and then be greeted by the following interface:

there are still some bugs in the service and WebCam drivers are notoriously instable, but in general this service was a huge success. This got me thinking of the reactions to the Business ByDesign UI in the last SAP influencer summit. Some people loved it and thought it was the best things since sliced bread. Other people thought it was stale, boring and full of many boxes.
An additional piece clicked when Thomas Otter (a.k.a. @vendorprisey) sent me a very nice piece how some people prefer ugly user interfaces and maybe that is the key – stop trying to “harmonize” and “align” user interfaces. One size (or look and feel) certainly does not fit all.
On the other hand – if you have 15 different screens for entering a material code and all fifteen are uniquely ugly, then some harmonization is in place

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Das Mensch als Industriepalast – Animated

I have the poster of “Das Mensch als Industriepalat” created by Fritz Kahn in 1926 hanging in my office for several years now. I can never get enough of looking at the tiny details and amazing vision of this. Today I was exposed to an amazing work done to create an animation out of the poster –

Der Mensch als Industriepalast [Man as Industrial Palace] from Henning Lederer on Vimeo.

This is purely hypnotizing. I can watch it for hours. (Courtesy of FlowingData)

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Or even worse

Funny quote from a Ruby on Rails installation guide:

“Incase you have problem installing using this command because you are currently on the plane or in the desert waging war against terror or may be worse behind a restrictive corporate proxy server, you need to download the gem files and install them individually.”

I love funny installation manuals. Which brings me to a recent conversation I’ve had with a Product manager of an upcoming SAP product. We discussed working together (his project and mine) and agreed that it made sense at which point one of the architects on the phone call asked – “can we get the installation manual so we can set up your product locally?” After a brief pause the guy answered. “No. Sorry. One of my KPIs is that I dont have an installation manual. If I have one – I’ve failed”.

This is the new SAP!

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iPhones, Faxes and BPM

Last week the Apple iPhone finally made “ali’yah” and is now available for sell in Israel. Of course, all the early adopters already had iPhones they brought from overseas, but that’s besides the point. The point is that all the banks, newspapers and media channels are stampeding to get an “iPhone application”. If only we have an iPhone application to our bank before the other guys have it, everything would be good, they say. My bank is no different and in the last months they have made giant steps in the digital arena – a really good mobile site (for us un-cool Blackberry users), twitter presence (@leumidigital) and even Video chats with your banker via cellular.

Leumi's iPhone App

All this is fine and dandy, until you actually need to get some money out of them. I happened to require a hefty amount of money this morning (this rugged look doesn’t come for free, you know), which means I needed a cashiers check. The following flow occurred:

1. I called the bank and told them I need the check.
2. They asked me to fax them the request with a manual signature.
3. I wrote a request in Word, printed it, signed it and faxed it to them.
4. I called again. They confirmed getting the fax.
5. They printed a new form, detailing my request, signed by a manager.
6. They faxed the signed request to the physical branch where the cashier actually sits.
7. They faxed it again (hey – the branch has 3 fax machines).
8. The cashier entered the details on her terminal (same details I gave over the phone about 7 steps ago), notified me on the commission.
9. The cashier printed another 2 pages – one where I sign that I agree to the commission the other is my receipt for the commission.
10. The cashier went to the manger (with a hefty stack of papers) to get his approval and signature.
11. Armed with the signature and stack of papers – the cashier came back to start processing my request (checking that I actually have the funds to back it up, etc.)
12. I got my check.

Now imagine if the bank had taken a long hard look at its process and simply employed some BPM system to streamline it… it should have looked like this:

1. I call the bank and request the check.
2. Bank checks that I have the funds, a notification is sent to the manger which gets it in an inbox and approves.
3. Manager approval is kept on file for the cashier to view.
4. Based on that approval she prints the check.
5. I get my check.

In general, I fail to understand the fixation so many organizations still have on a ‘paper trail’ all these faxes and manual signatures. Not only is this not environment friendly, this simply makes all processes mind-boggingly cumbersome and failure prone (e.g. faxing the authorization to the wrong fax machine in the branch). But hey – its so much sexier to launch an iPhone application and renovate your processes.

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The Business Case for Cloud Computing

(Picture Taken last week in the WDF21 cantina)

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Your Company’s App

Stumbled on this one today. So true. Worth also going to the comments for the enraged enterprise bots reactions…

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Desktop? Why?

So, the Hard-disk on my SAP laptop died. For the third time in 6 months. I have a small suspicion that the Good Ole’ T42 is about to reach the big scrapyard in the sky, but with the current offerings from our IT department, I’ll stick to my IBM workhorse as long as I can. The one on my personal desktop died a week ago, so I’m finding myself re-installing two machines at the same time.

Re-installing all the different software which I need for my daily work (full list below), I found myself asking – Why do I bother? Why don’t I have everything browser based, or VM based. My laptop dies? Who care. Its just hardware. I hear this sentiment more and more reflected when speaking to customers. One of them just told me this week: “Product xxx should go to the browser. Why do we need a desktop? why should we incur the cost of supporting a desktop (following the Vista fiasco)?. Our roadmap is inclined towards browser only, looking into virtualization (esp. with HTML 5 coming out). We don’t believe in RIA – the plug-in concept vs. the HTML5 vision”.

I do believe in RIA, but I see the point. As HTML gets better and better (See how Firefox 3.5 handles Video) and the desktop OS’s not becoming any more stable (yeah, yeah, Apple and Linux fan boys), I am trying more and more to keep my information at the cloud. Instead of backing up to an external hard-drive, I’m using Mozy. Instead of jotting things to little notebooks, I’m using Evernote. Remember The Milk. Slowly but surely – I’m going to the cloud. And if this is happening for my personal productivity, what will this mean to Enterprise software? Can we break down the monolith Enterprise apps to small pieces/services which run somewhere else? More to come.

So what did I install?

SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio (Eclipse) – see above

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