Collaboration Culture: What is it and how to create it? (Repost)

(originally posted on blogs.sap.com)

Why is a collaboration culture important and what can be done to „create“ a collaborative mindset in an organization or a team?

The importance of collaboration

Since I am working a lot with the topic of community building lately, it becomes obvious that one aspect of a community is crucial for its success: The community members. If those members are nice to each other, if they have a nice mood in their communication, if the members are polite and respectful, everyone will feel welcome.

But maybe even more fundamental is that the members are willing to contribute to the community. Contribution might be by answering others‘ questions, by sharing own experiences or just liking a blog post to show appreciation: Collaboration has to be high priority of any community.

Continue reading “Collaboration Culture: What is it and how to create it? (Repost)” →

Project SURGE – hello world! (repost)

(this post was originally posted on blogs.sap.com)

Hey there!

With this post I would like to introduce you to an initiative we just started and that we would also like to share here on the SAP Community. To name it, we thought of “SURGE” because (according to my dictionary) it stands for a rise of the water level, of something that is swelling – because we would love to see more successful innovation projects as consequence of our joint efforts.

But who am I and why am I writing these words? I work as a Customer Engagement Executive for SAP Cloud Platform. As Customer Engagement team, we have the vision to enable our customer’s IT organisations to use our Cloud Platform as the new platform for Extension, Integration and Innovation. Besides explaining the technical capabilities of our offering, I think it’s at least as important to understand how the methods and processes of software design, development and operations change for the members of IT teams. I feel that the massive amount of emerging new topics and the immense speed in which they are changing is a key challenge to be answered by every team out there that is using IT to run their business.
While preparing, I stumbled upon the term VUCA to describe this level of transformation and I think it’s quite suitable.

VUCA stands for: Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity. Let me phrase my personal understanding based on several resources I went through: Continue reading “Project SURGE – hello world! (repost)” →

Building Communities

There is this topic in my head for quite some time and I try to focus on it to add some clarity what it is really about.
I am consulting large enterprises to implement new development tools and methods. While of course, there are lot of open questions in terms of technology and its functionality, I see a maybe even bigger challenge in people’s mindsets. I noted some thoughts about Change Management and New Work on this blog already, but besides that, there is another big aspect which might help to sharpen my activities a little bit more.
The metaphor of self-help groups might be a little strong, but it makes a point:
Once you feel you are not alone with your challenges / concerns and you know there are others that also share openly their experiences (the good and the bad ones), it might be easier for you to get through it.
If you try something new and you see that others have already done it successfully, you might ask them how they did it and about mistakes they made in order to avoid them upfront.

I think one possible method to deal with the excessive need of education and challenging new technology is: Team up! We all struggle with the speed of evolution in the IT sector, some more, some less. But if we help each other, we can all have a more successful (and more fun!) journey, I’m sure.

john-schnobrich-2FPjlAyMQTA-unsplash — by john schnobrich via unsplash

Continue reading “Building Communities” →

The term New Work

My last articles’ subject was the motivation for Digital Transformation from a company’s point of view.

But the movement in this area is also bringing questions for the “other side” on the table: How do we as employees WANT to work? If the work-life is changing, can we maybe make some wishes?

As more and more people are working as knowledge-workers or creative workers instead of working on a big industry machine needing tons of material resources, their workspace needs less space – if it’s enough to have a mobile and a laptop with you, you are far more flexible where and when to get your stuff done. Continue reading “The term New Work” →

New Work & Fancy Offices

When picking up my girlfriend from the airport before Christmas, I used the waiting time to buy some magazines that are not (directly) related to my job profile – I chose something with a focus for design. In discussions with my girlfriend who is studying architecture, I figured out that design is much more than just making things look good but also to solve problem / offer solutions.
Quite often, the main goal of design is to hide complexity and make products / rooms / buildings look clean / simple / minimalistic. (Same goal as in most of the digitalization projects by the way)

Offices create / free energy!

When diving deeper into the topic, I recognized that a lot of design examples are actually offices. And there is a good reason for that: We spend a huge amount of our life working, most of us in offices, so it seems clear that people have an interest in nice offices where they feel well. (And Well-being for employees is kind of “en vogue” in business)

What also attracts attention is that especially the new cloud-native digital companies seem to shine in building new fancy offices and build references although they at the same time offer most flexibility for people to work remotely. It seems they even need to have more attractive offices so people meet physically and work together more closely.
Plus, they are of course as well in the middle of the “War for Talents” where fancy offices create a great attraction for the Generation Y.

Continue reading “New Work & Fancy Offices” →

outlook: Change Management in Digital times

In my job, I consult several mature companies with historically grown IT organisations.

Of course, they are in the middle of the Digital Transformation hype; when I come in contact with them they already licensed some Cloud-services and now try to get their head around how to implement this new technology in their organisation.

When talking about Digital Transformation, I see two big workstreams coming on the table: Continue reading “outlook: Change Management in Digital times” →

Digitale Transformation und die Menschen

Ich bin mittendrin in einem Prozess, der aktuell guten Gewissens als “Hype-Thema” bezeichnet werden kann: Digitalisierung.

Eigentlich beschäftige ich mich ja schon damit, das Leben meiner Mitmenschen digital zu machen. Sei es vor 100 Jahren die Installation des 56k Modem bei meinem Großvater, das Entwickeln einer Website für unseren Volleyballverein oder auch der heimliche Endgegner, die Neuanordnung der Senderliste auf einem Fernseher – ich war immer schon der Ansprechpartner für Fragen um “Digitales” im Alltag.

Es kommt mir natürlich ziemlich entgegen, dass genau dieses Thema aktuell scheinbar super gefragt ist, besonders auch bei Unternehmen. Während es für Privatpersonen immer einfacher wird, einen neuen Router aufzubauen oder eine App auf ihrem Smartphone zu installieren, sind Unternehmen immer noch in ihren komplexen IT-Prozessen gefangen, die sich so gar nicht mehr zeitgemäß anfühlen (hat hier jemand SAP GUI gesagt?). Continue reading “Digitale Transformation und die Menschen” →

Who the fuck is DevOps?

When trying to gain more knowledge about microservices, it’s nearly impossible to get around all the aspects of DevOps. The improvement of the DevOps processes is one of the major advantages for following the microservices philosophy. To get a better understanding about what DevOps really means (and what not), I’d like to collect some information here.

First of all, Wikipedia defines DevOps as follows: Continue reading “Who the fuck is DevOps?” →

SAP Cloud Platform SDK for iOS – what is that?

I would like to use the IoT-challenge and the brewcloud-project as opportunity for getting in touch with iOS-app-development in general (I mentioned my first steps in my last article) and the SAP Cloud Platform SDK for iOS in special.

When digging deeper into this topic, it seems first important to understand what SAP Fiori really is. Obviously, it has something to do with new, modern, mobile-enabled UIs by SAP, but is it a development language, a framework? What’s the exact definition of SAP Fiori? Is it the same as SAPUI5? Continue reading “SAP Cloud Platform SDK for iOS – what is that?” →

back in the free world

(I will write some texts about tech topics and I will write them in English. First, that’s kind of common in the tech world and second, it’s easier to connect with people around the globe if the text is in English.)

Soon, I will change my job and work in a new role within SAP. I will support customers with the SAP Cloud Platform , SAP’s Platform-as-a-Service-offer. One of the most common reasons for using a PaaS is enabling a development environment that is easy to set up and supports you in deploying and running your applications afterwards.

That brings me back to the world of non-SAP-software-development where I have some roots due to my Java history, but I haven’t touched that world too much in the lost couple of years working as SAP-consultant: Continue reading “back in the free world” →

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Category: job