What’s stopping Asia’s growing companies from innovating?

 

Welcome to my first entry in the CSDN Blog. As SAP Asia’s Chief Technology Officer for the region, I am happy to report that we see no slowdown in IT especially in the accelerating economies of China and India.   However, not all growing companies are being able to fully exploit the available market opportunities by evolving their systems and processes to provide innovative products and services to their local and global markets. Why?

 

To understand why, we need to examine “How will CIO’s grow IT’s contribution in 2006?”    By working across dual tracks in their agenda, that’s how.   One track requires working “in” the business by concentrating on current operations and improvements—for example, running and upgrading infrastructure, applications and operations.   In many cases, doing more with less. The other track requires working “on” the business by dealing with the future shape of the enterprise in terms of products, services and structure—for example, launching new products, LOBs or implementing new capabilities and organizational structures. Different tracks deliver different results. Effective CIO’s recognize when they are working in a particular track and manage expectations and operations in line with that track.

 

All too often, CIO’s and businesses get stuck in track one which can quickly become the path to downsizing and stagnate profits.

 

This is where services-oriented architecture makes the biggest impact on IT. This is why services-oriented architecture will replace simple internet architecture’s as the dominant paradigm. Because what services-oriented architecture’s allow these companies  to do is to modularize legacy, so that you can then interact with it in more flexible ways going forward and do reengineering. It is allowing you to componentize systems and to then take them forward selectively and then mix them in different ways and with new an innovative systems.  That is an extremely an important idea and it is tight very much to the whole role of SAP NetWeaver and Enterprise SOA.

 

So if you are a growing company or a company who wants to grow again – what should you do?   My suggestion is to focus on the many faces of “I” .

 

Firstly, “I” for Innovation.  Enterprises today need to embrace change. Hence , “I” in Innovation begins with the self. Innovation is an ongoing dialogue, this is a dialogue we have every single year of our life. It is a challenging dialogue to have to bridge the technology issues with the business issues. A recent Gartner CIO survey reveals that business expectations for CIOs and IT continue to evolve, as CIOs have demonstrated an ability to control IT costs and service quality. With these accomplishments as a baseline, CEOs are looking to CIOs and IT to provide greater support for business growth and enhance the enterprise’s ability to compete in an increasingly crowded market. CIOs recognize the need to change IT to deliver on increased business expectations. Growing IT’s contribution beyond providing high- quality and cost-effective services requires new ways of working with the business. 

Integration also shares the same “I” . On the infrastructure front, it is an important requirement to integrate existing applications and new applications. This was the driving force behind the creation of the open-standards based platform, SAP NetWeaver.    With this in mind – the customer can converge their existing platform and future-proof their architecture for growth, and for the partner, our platform allows to them to tap into SAP’s industry and applications experience accumulated over the last 30 odd years.

On a larger scale, we seek to integrate the market – hence we are growing our ecosystem and creating business communities. For example, we are signing up local ISV partners into our Powered by SAP NetWeaver program. When our customers work with these partners, you are also tapping into potential of the ecosystem of the entire SAP partner ecosystem. These independent software vendors (ISVs) and services providers are committed to providing customers with a common platform and service architecture that allows them to seamlessly fuse current IT environment and prepare for future business growth needs. These solutions take full advantage of the capabilities of SAP NetWeaver, our open-standards based application and integration platform, and enables customers to accelerate their business innovation needs and lower their total cost of ownership.

“I” also lends itself to Intelligence . To stay ahead of the competition, businesses also need to constantly refresh their Intelligence factor. In addition to loading up on market intelligence, organizations must also look inward to using and understanding important data that can be found from simple transactions. They can achieve this by increasing the type and quality of Analytics / Business Intelligence functionalities available in leading enterprise software (such as mySAP ERP!).   This brings business insight and actionable business process together for the first time enabling users to react in real time.

So, by adopting the key faces of the “I” in Innovation, smart companies across Asia are adapting and growing to capture the many opportunities in today’s market.