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InfoQ Homepage News SAP announces StreamWork as Solution for Collaborative Decision-Making

SAP announces StreamWork as Solution for Collaborative Decision-Making

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SAP has recently introduced StreamWork as a cloud-based solution for collaborative decision-making. According to the German ERP company its product

brings together the people, information, and proven business approaches to drive fast, meaningful results.

The main purpose of the social networking application that reveals some similarities with Facebook is the cooperation within teams. Team members may share information, discuss upcoming business discussions in a brainstorming process, and then decide.

A concrete show case may look like the following one: a software engineer creates a new activity for deciding on a proposed design convention, adds some context information, and invites others to participate.  He then assigns actions to the participants such as applying a SWOT analysis (Strength-Weaknesses-Opportunities-Threats), and deciding on whether to accept or reject the proposal.

According to Rita Sallam from Gartner Research,

Social and collaboration capabilities have the potential to improve the quality and transparency of decisions and drive positive outcomes if they can be married to a user's existing applications, information and business processes. Collaborative decision-making applications that are linking with existing business processes like performance management, CRM, forecasting, and procurement, bring the right people together and provide the tools they need to make better decisions. For example, BI users, such as sales managers evaluating sales performance across regions or products, or product managers deciding which new product ideas to fund, or finance managers allocating capital expenditures across strategic projects now have an efficient way to bring the right people together to analyze and discuss results and agree on a course of action - and capture the entire process - rather than the disconnected manual efforts of the past.

StreamWork is being provided as SaaS (Software as a Service) offering, with a free “Basic Edition” and a “Professional Edition” for 96 Euro per year. In addition, SAP offers an “Enterprise Edition” which may be integrated in existing SAP installations. SAP partners can also integrate their own applications into StreamWork. Examples currently include Box.net, Evernote, and Scribd.

An advertisement video on YouTube is supposed to introduce the basic motivation behind using StreamWork. Other videos such as a slide presentation are also available.

More details are available on SAP’s StreamWork web site.

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