April, 2007 – Designing Effective "Self-Serve" Portals for User Convenience and Business Efficiency: SAP – a Case Study

Jerome Nadel: Hello. I am Jerome Nadel, Executive Managing Director and Vice President of Human Factors International. Welcome to this live webcast from HFI's Usability Broadcast Network presented live from Park Avenue in New York City. Today's topic is Designing effective "self-serve" portals for user convenience and business efficiency, a case study. It's my pleasure to introduce Ed Sander who is the Senior Director of New Product Strategy and at SAP. Ed, looking forward to this discussion I know you are extremely knowledgeable and passionate about this topic. Perhaps you can give us some context of what you do in this capacity. I know that you've shifted from the role that you had previously when we were working on this together.

Ed Sander: Sure. Years ago when we were working together, Jerome, I led the content and knowledge management group at SAP. Like most large enterprise companies really even smaller firms we grapple with how we want to manage information. That's one thing that I did when we were working together. Now also with large enterprise companies like SAP we look to make very judicious decisions on which products we want to bring out to the market, which serve the best needs of our customers and that really comprises the skillful responsibility that I have in the product strategy.

Jerome Nadel: Excellent. And I think that's the context for the conversation we're going to have. This is more than a case study of course. SAP the theme here being SAP runs SAP. And we will speak to the collaboration around the implementation of SAP's corporate portal. But it also provides a bit of context around what makes for an effective portal both in terms of technology and process. And I know you'll be excited to be speaking about this.

Ed Sander: Absolutely.

Jerome Nadel: Let me take care of a couple of logistics over here. You'll not that from HFI's website you can download a case study associated with this webcast as well a complete schedule of upcoming webcasts. Note, we'll be doing another live session at 3:30 Eastern Daylight Time and I encourage you to be thinking in advance about submitting questions that will be coming back for an open dialog at the end of this session. With that, let's move to the topics that we will be covering by way of overview. Five key sections and we will begin hopefully, provocatively with a bit of discussion around a shift to self-serve because suggesting that the model in our personal lives and work lives has shifted. We'll then move over to Ed who will talk about what customers want and I think you'll find that he is certainly credentialized to be doing that not only from SAP perspective, but from a market dynamic perspective. We'll then move in to the case study and take in the perspective of what were the requirements, what was the context, what was the process approach methodology, and of course results of that collaboration. We'll come back and Ed will lead on some trends in the market place and have some discussions around what's happening with 2.0, Enterprise 2.0. How are portals shifting? What are the models that we are seeing to come to there and come to market. We'll have some conclusion and then again we're going to leave time for a set of questions coming in and I think that will really be the opportunity to have some continued dialog. So let's move in and talk a little bit about this shift to self serve. And we do this by way of a story over here. So when we look at the advent of the internet, you know, we have the opportunity over here to have pervasive ubiquitous access to information at our finger tips. We can electively ask someone else for help or for information, or we could find it for ourselves. We shift into being able to do simple transactions for ourselves and again, this is elective. So I can go to a store front or I can do it for myself. New business models, we have virtual store fronts. We have new revenue models associated with how existing stores can act as vendors in the e-channel space as opposed to doing it physically. But the key theme here is I as a consumer of information or product or service have the ability to do it for myself or have other do it for me.

And I think things shift radically as we move to this next slide talking about the implications when this encroaches inside the fire wall of the organizations where we work. Now things shift where from a poor business application perspective I am doing for myself. I am doing HR, I am doing accounting related, travel related. These things are put on me and there are business cases, cost savings, ROI TCO business cases predicated on the ability for end-users to serve themselves. And this is a radical shift where it's no longer elective but mandatory, which brings us by context to this next slide. And perhaps stating the obvious, but fundamentally and we've had a lot of discussions about this. Things needs to work. And we could look at the 2 dimensions of this. Of course, they need to be useful and they need to be usable. And this is something in this business oriented context in our discussion that we want to bring across. It's not just the issue of ensuring usability, but ensuring that we have effective systems that work and meet organizational success criteria that they are meeting business objectives. And I think again you'll find through the introduction of the case study and discussions around that that's really the theme over here. Ensuring that we have technologies and processes and systems that work.

So moving on and again setting context leading up to market dynamic and the incidents that led to our collaboration in fact over a year and a half back that we will be speaking to. This is a survey study that had come out from Forester about the time that we were working on this collaboration. And it was interesting and you find a lot of themes reinforcing the same type of observation that executives buy portal technology assuming that it's going to solve some core business issues. They are looking for gains. They are looking for improved productivity, improved collaboration, and what's stated, and the points that I highlight on this given slide, or that the expectations of increased productivity of increased collaboration did not necessarily manifest. And a theme that I know we're going to want to speak to or may be you could comment on right away is often people look at the portal not only from the perspective of single sign on and simplified access to various tools and role-based content, but they are looking for immediate gains. And they think that the implementation of the portal itself is going to provide that result.

Ed Sander: Absolutely. I couldn't agree with you more, Jerome. And even speaking to the slides that you had just previously, I think we carry a lot of expectations on user dynamics that we see in our personal lives into the work place. And those really culminate into the different expectations that we have as users for the efficiencies that we believe as individuals we should gain by a portal implementation within the work place. It's just inherent that when any individual that's responsible for improving collaboration or that manages an internal portal wants to translate those into business economics that benefit the company, there's a laundry list. The laundry list is achievable when there is a specific plan and really when you prioritize what is going to deliver the most benefit to your users.

Jerome Nadel: So if you will, if you don't know where you are going, don't run. And a lot of discussion over here is what are these success criteria? What are the KPIs? What could be measured? And that's a set way to the next slide, actually, where we suggested success is measurable. But be clear proactively what these success matrix are. And what we found impressive on the HFI collaboration side is immediately in this engagement we were looking more holistically not only what is the interface, what is optimal best practice interface for portal design, but let's look at role definition. Let's look at publishing models. Let's look at overall processes. And what's suggested on this slide is success is in fact measurable. We could look from a perspective of a bench mark review and one that we'll share within the collaboration and the case study over here. We could look at it from our perspective of usability testing, an empirical objective way to assess is it working better than it did before against the criteria that had been pre-established. We can look and I'll be concluding with the idea of continuous usability or strategic usability whereby you are measuring through time. And if you are clear around your key performance indicators, your success matrix being able to measure and demonstrate hopefully the improvement is the way to ensure that you are reaping the benefit of the technology and the processes well.

Ed Sander: If I could just add here.

Jerome Nadel: Sure.

Ed Sander: I really think that when you're setting up your KPIs and performance matrix, really even the road map that you are going to follow in your own portal initiative, keep it simple. Think about your end destination point. And really there are just a plethora of matrix that you could choose from, downloads of documents for e.g. is something that we could consider during our implementation, but think instead really about the time that you are giving back to your employees. What matrix can you choose that really are true effective measures of whether or not the portal that you do deliver really is making lives easier for your employees.

Jerome Nadel: So make sure you are clear on what success means. And again, this is a complex dynamic. Simple measures might be misleading in fact. And I think again as we get into the case study and Ed speaks to some of the market dynamics and what SAP customers are what the market is speaking to, that will become more clear. So we'll move into the second section of the initial presentation over here looking at what customers want. What are effective attributes of portals? What's working, what's not. And again, it's interesting that Ed has shifted in various senior-level roles at SAP and I think this current capacity more on the what's happening strategically, what's happening in the market today with technologies and what are other vendors doing in terms of reaction to that. What's happening down the road. Gives some good context and good introduction to what makes portals beyond the technology aspect of the portal. What makes portals effective? So let's transition and here we see slide titled will the portal solve our problems?

Ed Sander: Sure I mean when we evaluate new extensions to our current product portfolio in a new role that I have that Jerome had mentioned, we're always coming back to some common things. What ultimately is going to make the lives of customers easier? How are we going to help our individual customers as employees within the contract of their own companies really make a greater contribution that leads to more satisfaction for them and more positive results for the company. The same thing is really true when you are thinking about portal implementation. And what we often have when we start on the embarkation of that journey because it is a journey is the portal is the panacea. Won't it solve all of my problems both at the corporate level, but also individually for individual job roles. Well, in terms of individual market requirements or what we see just based on the work that we've done with our customers, what we will learn pragmatically through the experience we had is that everybody has the same expectation. If we make this change, if we install a portal, it is going to solve a lot of the challenges that the company has. The truth in the matter is that it can, but only when it is managed in a stage process, only when the right pillar is in place that support the portal as an effective instrument within the company are also in place, and there is thoughtful planning around them.

So if we, we actually move on to the next slide we begin to see just some examples of how some other firms have done this just to give you a contextual reference point. Because everybody has their own individual image of what an effective portal should be. And I think one of the design themes that we will come to a little bit later in the discussion is this concept of creating this center of knee concept for the employer, for the individual. Even when you go back to thinking about the self serve examples that Jerome cited earlier in the conversation, a lot of them come back to how do I have different access to information and transactional capability that makes my life easier at the time that I want it relevant to me. This concept of me is really at the heart of what constitutes an effective portal and was one of the fundamental things that we learnt in our collaboration that HFI really helped us with.

So whether it's print or on the next slide an example from IBM that's a little bit dated, you see that information when it's presented with context and when there is transactional capability that's delivered to the individual is really what creates this concept of me in the user-centered approach to the portal that really is, it's not just a place that people go on the web internally within the company. It's their doorway into a more productive life.

Jerome Nadel: Which sounds, if I may add, it sounds like a simple task or a goal to achieve. But when we step back a bit, a lot of the discussions that we will get into that we've had in a collaboration was around role definition and role regularity.

Ed Sander: Absolutely.

Jerome Nadel: So this becomes fundamental because portals are about roles and we don't live in this singular siload role dimension. What happens when we have multiple roles? What is the definition of me? And that's one of the things that we're going to be speaking to is how do you deal with this cross role dynamic and in fact give me based on what I am doing now what I need. Because that's the ultimate goal over here.

Ed Sander: And there really is a road map that companies can follow in starting off on this process and it was a road map that we were collaboratively able to build together that led to some of the results that SAP was able to achieve. But there are pillars to this road map that you can begin thinking about. So right on the next slide. Having and understanding for individual users and the users that you want to cater to definitely is a precept to an effective portal implementation strategy in moving a portal from just an individual instance that aggregates information to having it be an effective self-serve work place. But some of the pillars that you need to think about as part of this road map are having three disciplines in place. Four is contextual pieces within your road map. One is this concept of having a practice approach towards how are you going to be managing information, content management, having a strategy for that. It's fundamental that information be easy to access. But not just information that's passive in terms of documents or individual pieces of content that you are putting into a web page or that you are making downloadable through an individual instance. But how you create access not only to passive but also or explicit information but also the passive information. So this idea of knowledge access and collaboration as an instance within the portal is also important.

Jerome Nadel: Once again, easier said than done.

Ed Sander: Right.

Jerome Nadel: These are some of the pillars that you speak to, but fairly difficult to achieve. And I think we will be speaking to that more.

Ed Sander: And this concept finally just of collaboration is not just peer to peer, but it is really using a portal that's designed as a self-serve work place to be a point of collaboration. All of your employees within the company have contact with partners, with other employees, with customers. If your portal is an individual hub for a collaboration, it can really be an instrument that takes customer feedback or partner feedback back to the individual teams that are creating your products, that are implementing the strategy for the company so that it really becomes a 360 continuous loop to enrich really the business plan or the product mix or structure of the company

Jerome Nadel: Which is interesting, because I think we go toward what are trends moving forward. There are discussions around 2.0 technology and what does it mean is the portal just an instance within the firewall or when we talk about collaboration and knowledge sharing, does it extend back as a service provider as a vendor. Or your customers are now becoming a part of the social network as well and we will have some discussions about that too. So carrying on with this theme, Ed.

Ed Sander: Sure. So there are definitely elements that we found both within the market and certainly within our own implementation of the portal that really helped to make these individual concepts come alive. And the good news here is that just as we had talked about before with the examples for the Sprint and the IBM work places that we've shown before, these concepts for effective portals really are adopted within the market place. As you can see by some of the individual quotes from partners that we've worked with both from a business perspective, but that we also tapped into as part of this journey that Jerome was mentioning earlier and implemented it into the new corporate portal. So just very simply, some recommendations based on the experiences that we've shared, when you think about content management, it should be at the object level. Deal with the individual nuggets of information and try to get your road map and strategy correct so that you can reuse them and gain efficiency. Ensure that the information that you deliver to your customers or your partners that you really try to create a threaded process throughout the organization that people have visibility to. That's when you are really going to have the benefits of that content supply chain. Knowledge access is not just simply posting information so that it's downloadable and accessible at the home page, but it is delivering that with content or context to the individual roads that you are catering to. And I can't really stress enough that just placing information without also placing it along side the ability to do things that have context to the information that's presented is really going to miss out on the transformation of your portal as an individual works place. When information is delivered along side contextual task capability, that's when you are really beginning to advance your portal storing.

Jerome Nadel: Absolutely.

Ed Sander: And then finally, collaboration. We've all thought about when we are either getting ready for a sales call or we are trying to find the numbers that we need for that quarter close forecast, if only I could find this person that or recall this conversation that I knew that had the pieces of information that I was looking for. Your portal can become a magnet of individual activity within your employee community if people understand and think that they can actually go to it with the right technologies in place and use that as a place just to ask questions, what's better than just having a 24 x 7 hot line that you can go and interact with. And a portal when it is effectively designed can be that.

Jerome Nadel: Excellent. So this sets some context as we move forward into the case study over here of again spoken to as SAP runs SAP. And there was an interesting dynamic. HFI had collaborated with SAP in the past. You had come to us I think in a lovely warm August saying hey, we have another challenge for you. And we got to move quickly over here. We're taking a market-driven view from a board edict that we need to improve against best practice our own corporate portal. And that's your implementation of a that time enterprise portal set. We had come out to Walldorf for the kick off in Germany and engaged or embarked on this finite journey to provide some both tactical but also long-term improvements to your corporate portal. And the intent and I had asked you to elaborate on that was to just go beyond internal improvement, but use that in fact as a sales instrument to say when we think of effective portal implementation and again on top of EP 6. This is how we envision it should work.

Ed Sander: Yeah, absolutely. When we started on this journey a year and a half ago, we knew that we wanted to be in a different place than we were at the starting point. Like any large company that is decentralized and operates in a number of different countries and really has a global work force, we had individuals that were very proactive in creating their own resources. And that's the hallmark of a successful company when you have that as just part of the cultural gesto. Well, what that had created for us over the past 30 years was multiple instances of internal portals that had a different structure. They had different information offering. And our challenge at that time was to try and take everything that was good in each of those individual instances, harmonize them and bring them together. We certainly felt that we needed to work with in collaboration with a partner that had a practiced approach towards understanding individual user needs but really they could help us to build a road map. I want to stress again that it's really important when you are thinking about your portal initiative, have a clear picture of your design your end point that you are designing for, but it's important that you have a road map. So we are looking for that in our partner.

On the next slide you can see, sorry Jerome.

Jerome Nadel: So here again the vision of self-serve.

Ed Sander: Absolutely, again, going back to some of those simple pillars that we felt were important, when we thought about the portal, we really wanted it to be an instrument for organization efficiency by helping to pool information together in a managed process. It was very important that it was perceived as being the channel of information and interaction for the employees within the company. If we had a managed process for how we managed content and information, if we delivered it through a single channel, then we felt that we would have the building blocks in place really to begin building the collaborative network that people could not only go to receive information, but really true insight that would make their lives easier and that they could communicate. It was fundamentally important though that each of those three attributes within the portal and you can see the road map that we had laid out on the slide set there, that it was all bounded by a very practiced approach towards how would that information be usable, consumable, and adopted by the employees. So a practiced approach towards use case and user centered design was very important.

Jerome Nadel: I think what's interesting in this road map as well is it clearly goes beyond the user interface, you know looking at the totality of user experience, there are processes that under lie the experience that the user has. And we will get into more detail around role granularity, role definition, publishing processes, how do we change organizational culture to adopt and embrace this new portal work frame model and you and I were discussing at breakfast this morning in fact the notion that the portal is more than a piece of technology. It's a way an organization works. And there is a shift associated with that that ensures that the portal will have its return on investment. And the catalyst for us to ask you to participate in this webcast was to share that point of view in part that it's not just I have the silver bullet piece of technology or I even have best practice interface design. There are processes that under lie there are organizational dynamics that need to come together to make this all work and optimize user experience with the benefits of increased productivity, collaboration etc. that we spoke to before.

Ed Sander: Absolutely.

Jerome Nadel: So let's move on and get in to what happened a while back and what you'll see as we talk about some of these guiding principles for portal design, this was in fact the starting point. We had jumped on a plane again a couple of my team members came over. We had the kick off meeting with you and colleagues and let's step back a bit because I remember that there was a meeting. There had been a board meeting. May be give some dynamic on what was the word go to say hey we need to be looking at this now.

Ed Sander: Sure. Well, as I mentioned before over the past 30 years a number of different portals had arisen internally and it got to the point that it really was taxing not only from an infrastructure perspective internally within the company, but it was also it was beginning to impact productivity. There was a Herculean effort that was required to maintain all of that information. Individuals had to leave bread crumb trails for themselves and numerous favorites. Once they found a piece of information would they find it again? So we knew and it was all the way to the board level, our CEO actually became involved in the entire project. We knew that we had to harmonize and bring information together. That was the very clear edict. Create one information repository and work place that the employees could use and drive some efficiencies from there. We had some aspirational objectives on top of that because of some of the design point opinions that we had personally that we were able to weave into the plan.

Jerome Nadel: Excellent. So we started with four guiding principles. And its interesting the language might change but I think some of these teams were stating the same and you know you talked about keeping it simple. Parsimony rules at the top. And I think you'll see that we've shifted as we talk about the beginning of redesign or suggested redesign to a more simplified information architecture. What are the siloads of areas that I can go to find what I need? Can I reduce it? Can I bring it back more into the context of it is me? And we will talk about this me centricity of give me everything I need in the multiple roles that I play and the multiple tasks that I perform. We talk about starting at the top and the imperative of having an effective home page and the subsequent landing pages for each top level area that I navigate to. They are informative. They describe what's here, what I can do, and are that starting point within each of these places that I navigate to. We talked about the notion of a publishing process and again and we will discuss as we move on in the world of 2.0. Although this is shifting, there needs to be structure. And we talk about you know in this world of 2.0 folksonomical tagging and everybody contributes in a random organic way that isn't necessarily optimal from your point of view and I concur and we will speak to that as well. So what is an effective publishing process? How do I get good content artifacts knowledge out just in time? How do I manage that in a way where it's readily available where we are tapping on the collective expertise. But it's also organized and coherent. And then finally the idea that it is of course more than content and just sticking instances of applications within port lets or I views is not necessarily going to be adequate. You talked about contextual access to things that I need associated with tasks that I am performing. So clearly, the portal is more than just a mechanism to aggregate content.

Moving on and we will walk through a fairly classical sequence of user centered design as HFI sees it. And you'll note that we don't begin at the end user. We begin and you embraced this approach with us at the executive stake holder perspective. What are success criteria from various stake holders and what you see here rendered is the framework of multiple constituencies each identifying their own priority and then us attempting to synthesize that in to what are some core themes that would effectively satisfy each of the constituencies. And as you've already shared, 40,000 employees, a global organization with somewhat arguably fragmented initiatives and the like how does that all come together into one unified framework. Not only in the instance of the portal itself, but the processes that underlie that. And I suggest to those of you who are going through some portal design and redesign or any large systems design, involve stake holders at the top. Get them to articulate what their opinions are what success would mean. And when you come back to the beginning of visual design, you can remind everybody collectively of what are the individual priorities and perspective. What are the consolidated priorities as well.

Ed Sander: Yeah. I can't underscore and agree with you enough, Jerome. I think that you know if there is a hallmark design point that you have towards a portal implementation road map, it really is starting off with what would seemingly be very intuitive but often is over looked in the process that most firms even our customers have when they are implementing this initiative as well. It is very important to get stake holder buy in, but also to get stake holder contribution. The executives are very important. We have the luxury of having that at SAP. But think about not just about the individual users as Jerome had said, but also think about the individuals that have to maintain the content within the portal. Get their input as well. Also work with the people that have to maintain it from an infrastructure perspective. When you can have a 360 view, you really do have buy in and you'll have support for the end state objectives that you are striving for.

Jerome Nadel: Absolutely. And it's bringing consensus early in terms of the vision at least and then the challenges to translate that vision into something tangible. So the second part moving into the best practice review is establishing matrix. And I wont' go into a lot of detail about the approach towards score carding over here, but we were asked objectively against best practice design implementation of portals regardless of portal product or technology. Against best practices, how are we doing today? And we gave an objective critique that was structured in and was the starting point to say this is an expert view of where you are today. And there are opportunities in given areas. It helped us prioritize and get some agreement on what's working well, where are there opportunities for improvement.

Ed Sander: Yeah, and in this too is also it seems very intuitive. But it's an often overlooked component of the process. Think beyond just the actual dynamics of portal efficiency from a technology perspective. Because while the operative process of downloads and accessibility and a number of clicks to access information is important, when you could think about the portal within the context of what is the business success criteria of the individual business divisions or the employee populations in teams that will interact and use with the portal, you'll have very strong matrix that will make the portal part of the business strategy of the company as opposed to the infrastructure.

Jerome Nadel: That's an excellent point. And again I think user experience, usability practitioners often miss that business orientation that these key performance indicators that these matrix are critical. And they are not about usability. They are about business success. And when you are speaking in those terms, it changes the perspective of the value of user experience in usability. So we talked about stake holder interviews, getting stake holders involved. We talked about establishing matrix and of course classically within user centered design, you need to go out to end users. So the next slide speaks very briefly to the notion of user centered analysis. And this was a wonderful collaboration. Because in fact one of your colleagues I believe was completing her Ph.D. in ethno-graphics study, a multi disciplinary framework around sociology and anthropology that deep dives and shadows end users to say what is a day in the life and we were able in collaboration to partner where we took the more classical finite interview in contextual inquiry and couple that with this deep dive ethno-graphic study. This was done internationally, and we had the opportunity to create the beginning of a persona library. The idea of identifying these core common roles. This was not an overly academic initiative. Of course we didn't have time, but the notion of beginning to establish and clarify these roles, what are common tasks, what's the profile, how do I think, obviously feeds right back in to what level of role granularity is required. What is a role? What is a cross role? And I know we had a lot of healthy discussion and almost internal debate around how deep to go in terms of role definition. And I know you have a comment on that, but from our perspective and we collaborate on a lot of portal implementation, that's always a challenge looking at the core HR database. Is it by job function? How are we dealing with that even at a single sign on level from an active directory etc. What is the model of identifying what a role is and what each user should get?

Ed Sander: Yeah, and you know, while SAP had the luxury of having a professionally credentialed ethnographer on staff, you can achieve the same benefits by using just a simple feasible practices and tools. And don't really think about this as jumping into the ocean and having to go through end stage analysis paralysis. There are some very simple processes that you can use to jump start this process. You don't have to accomplish everything in one fell swoop. Do enough to start the ball and to get it rolling. And it's something that you can come back and revisit. Any portal implementation is an iterative process, but it is important to have these two pieces at the very front end.

Jerome Nadel: But the intellectual capital that comes out of this type of exercise, these personas are still valuable.

Ed Sander: Absolutely.

Jerome Nadel: And I encourage our clients all the time to build these libraries. In each instance of user-centered initiative, build these libraries because you could come back to them and you'll be able to use them again. Let me digress for a moment and remind you that I am encouraging you to submit questions because that will lead to some healthy discussion at the end of the session.

So let's move on. So we've basically gotten smart from a stakeholder perspective, from a structured matrix based review, from the end user data gathering both ethnographic and classical user centered analysis and then we came into the beginning of a shift as we suggest over here to intent base the content navigation. And on the top of this slide, you'll see what had existed before. And arguably without being overly critical although we work collectively and allowing ourselves to be critical at the time, it was what we commonly see. A fairly siload perspective where to do something I go there. And we spent on the bottom, you see the diagram, and you helped us a lot in refining the way we deliver the message. And there's a lot to that. As you see, it's me centric. And within me centric it is titled with my work. Everything about my work. And then in that kind of Boolean union you see multiple roles and we are just postulating in a more sales and marketing capacity over here three roles but then they intersect or the union of those is what is everything that I need to do around these three roles? What are my tasks? What are the applications I need access to? What's relevant for me even in terms of informational push? And the other liberty we took which is rarely embraced fully is the idea that it's me before company. And you see that reflected in this diagram over here suggesting that what I authenticate and come to this unified work space, its' the metaphor that you were suggesting, I come in and it starts with me, not necessarily with company on top. And that's a recommendation that we like to promote but is often organizationally challenged in terms of the ordering of company versus me. Any comment?

Ed Sander: Yeah, this definitely is an ideal benefit that for those of you who are involved in either managing information and it's delivery within your company or actually responsible for the portals, are probably very empathetic with. Usually when most companies think about re-architecting how they deliver information internally, they take a very company centric approach as you do an employee centric approach with the me concept or the individuals point of view is being the prevailing design point and how that information is delivered. And SAP was no exception. We started off with a company centric point of view. Then it was by product. Then it was by organizational structure. But as Jerome was saying, these do lead for very siload matrix and web of information delivery that only boils and rolls back actually to the operative process and the challenge really that any company will have in delivering that information without having the benefits of cross organizational collaboration. But the concept of the individual user, whether it's a customer or an employee or a partner is something that really everybody can rally around and contribute their opinions to. And ultimately, that concept of user design going all the way back to the example that you used at the beginning of our conversation really is a fundamental hallmark of what we are all looking for when we move on line, engage with the portal in an attempt to make our lives easier. When the information is delivered with context to the role that we play within the company, the stage that we are at within the career, where we are at within the annual process, it becomes a tool that we actually are very happy to engage with because it directly supports the roles that we have in the company.

Jerome Nadel: A bit philosophical, but you know wherever I am in, in space and time give me what I need. And that's the ultimate user interface and portals really are intended to meet that goal. So we talk about a progression and this was the beginning of my endearment towards you, because we came in in a typical tactical way. But you embraced this long term vision. You said, sure we know we need to implement this change in a fairly short order because there was an executive edict, but let's look down the road. Let's be clear on what ultimate would mean. And how we can visualize that, how that would manifest in terms of portal design. So what you see on this slide over here in terms of the navigation road map is the idea of this progression from what was there before to a short term shift to the ultimate longer term. And I think it's interesting for the usability experts in the field. As we look at the days of dot com, there were lot of challenges or discussion around information architecture. Should it be broad or should it be deep. And the general notion at that time was make it broad or expose all of the places you can go at the top level. And you see actually a shift away from that model in this long-term view suggesting that in this me centric world you know Froid was right. It is all about me. Give me everything I need when I come in. And that translated as we'll show in the slide that follows of the suggested home page that there's a second level navigation that then exposes all of the things about me. But start with me and collect that as the container of things that reflect the multiple roles that I have, the tasks I need, and the contextual access to information around those tasks. And that led to a recommended design. And of course, we are not showing the totality of that, but in fact, you'll see as Ed will share in a couple of minutes when you look at the ultimate implementation, it embraced much of this approach. There were the challenges of company before me, the overall framework of the short term versus the longer term vision. But I think this is still held as a banner to say this is the spirit of where we want to go. And you've moved towards that by and large. So some of the attributes over here, you see you are starting at the me level with an overview of delivering the message and giving the user what they need. So without getting into all the details of the design over here, really it was a shift in terms of access to task-related applications and related information in a framework that was coherent. And one of the things that we've not discussed is search. Because I think what you often find in our experience is as portals as internets grow in this siload framework, the reliance on search increases almost exponentially and then the initiatives are almost misguided, because the intent now is how do we improve search because people can't find what they are looking for as opposed to let's re-architect the way we taxonomically catalog the things that people need.

Ed Sander: Well, search yeah is very important and we were alluding to it earlier with one of the points that I had mentioned about knowledge, access. But search is also pervasive to navigational design and I think that we also touch on that a little bit within this conversation. It's fundamentally important in why you also need to have that practiced approach towards how you are managing the information. When you have that approach, then you can have a taxonomy and meditative structure that is intuitive not to the information publisher but to the actual user that will be using and consuming the information. When you have that orientation, search is just made much more easier.

Jerome Nadel: And search works better as well, absolutely. So moving forward, because we certainly want to save time for the good questions I am sure you are compiling and submitting right now. So the next framework over here was to say let's look in terms of templates and patterns. And we talk here about page templates and the notion was it's not just about the top page, but let's demonstrate some instances not just in detail design, but as templates that create patterns. So as given areas of redesigning, they are community pages. What's the difference between a large site and a small site? What are the differences between an overview page or an informational page and we came up with a core set of templates and describe them in the patterns that they would create for a navigation. And that became really a navigation road map.

Ed Sander: Yeah. And this really was one of the core assets that I feel that SAP really received that it then started thinking in the engagement that we had with your firm, Jerome. Usually when you think about search or information access, we almost always default not pedantically but to mast head and left nav structure. But when you have an approach towards how you design the information and the individual predictable patterns for page design, you can create a natural structure that's very intuitive so that individuals know when they are at higher level pieces of information within the overall structure of the portal or when they are drilling down deep. And you can it frees you from having to just to rely strictly on mast head or left or right side navigation. But this really was one of the pieces that helped the overall usability adoption within the SAP corporate portal.

Jerome Nadel: That's a very satisfying thing to hear because we look at things in that way as well. So in closing the case study, we speak to what is the self-serve information work place of today and let's comment on that before we move on and talk about trends.

Ed Sander: Sure. So here what you are looking at right now is the actual instance. This is a screen shot from my own desktop last week, just at about the time of our portal announcement. But you can see that the work that we've done today has really delivered an individual work place that really services the needs of SAP's entire employee population. Over 40,000 individual users we have a significant number of daily traffic everyday. It's localized across every single country that we operate within. But more importantly you can't see it here from how this information is delivered, although the top mast head alludes to it. We do have individual structure. There are almost different channels of the portal depending on section of the company that you work within, the role that you have within that company, and the information that services the foundational layer for this delivery, its all the same. We have one information platform. We have one set of guiding design principles for the user-specific roles that are delivered through the portal and we have adopted some of the best practices that came out of not only HFI's acumen but also the ethno-graphic studies that we've completed earlier. The end result was that this was a project that everybody felt was they were involved in from the board all the way down to the individual employee and our subsidiaries and it was one of the reasons why it was so highly adopted. People felt that they had a part in birthing the baby.

Jerome Nadel: Excellent. And that was really the intent of that kind of methodological overview from stakeholder interviews on out to the results of that. In the interest of time, I guess we are on the 45 minute mark here. We'll move forward and talk about trends and we could obviously spend more than a set of minutes on this, but you know what we're hearing a lot is what does 2.0 mean? Let's talk about Enterprise portal and folksonomy versus taxonomy and what happens when everybody is a contributor. Social networks should intranet portals have blogs. Should they be open to customer facing etc. And I had a couple of slides that I wanted to share, present some context around that and then perhaps we can have some comment on that.

Ed Sander: Sure.

Jerome Nadel: And I expect we will be receiving questions as well. So with that, we move into this notion of moving to 2.0 at work. And a lot on this slide for you on the receiving end, but the intent is to show this dichotomy between present day or if you will yesterday's internet into the newer world of 2.0. And if you will, and we had discussed this off line as well. Its at some level more of the same. It's really not this radical shift. It's just a continual where now the ability within the metaphor of social network for all experts to contribute is being improved. And I think Ed and I share the same view that when you hear in the purest organic sense of 2.0 folksonomical tagging and everybody contributes that that wouldn't work within an organization because you need some structure. You need some taxonomical expertise to say these are logical categories, but not embracing the benefit of the internal experts being able to contribute and you talked about in the spirit of the 24 x 7 improved collaboration. I have a question. Let me get away from you know the sneakernet or the cell phone and actually go to this unified work place to around a given topics hear what other experts have to say and let these experts continue to refine the way things are taxonomically catalogued. And with that again another slide that has some complexity associated with it. This reflects a lot of the thinking that we've done at HFI and I'll begin in the center. And here you see the notion of publishing. And so you've got and a lot of the discussions we had in this engagement were about what's the optimal publishing model. How do we take this global framework of publishing and structure it while creating freedom. And so in this framework you see the publisher can be the taxonomical expert or that can be filtered through a taxonomical expert. And ultimately artifacts, knowledge is going to be published. Let's come in at the top left if you will and coming down into the portal you see that you're at the top level page, there are personalized pages, either through search or browse you ultimately arrive at that given document. One of the things we look at is the container for that document needs to more and more encapsulate capabilities that enable end users to contribute. So here is the context when they are at the given document that they can say this is interesting. Let me discuss. Let me provide my own folksonomical tags. Let me see what others have done. Use the instincts of that piece of knowledge as the opportunity to provide collaboration. And I'll suggest moving toward conclusion that the user interface is the medium to influence how your end users behave. Which is a shift psychologically its suggesting through the interface you can control and manage the user interaction and experience. And as we've talked about the cultural aspects of good portal implementation, there is clearly a cultural shift as well. So just plugging in the technology and expecting miracles to happen is probably an expectation that will be unfulfilled. But if you think in this way about what your intent is and how the interface can influence the way people act and collaborate, these are some of the things that we see as trends and ways to address them from an interface design and user experience perspective.

Ed Sander: Yeah absolutely. I think you really, as we discussed before, you really do need to have the core in place. Your core road map, your understanding of your user communities, the business matrix outline that you are really trying to achieve. But once you have that core in place and you do walk through that initial implementation, it definitely makes sense to use some of the enterprise services oriented architecture or technologies and capabilities that web 2.0 delivers whether it is having individual applets or increasing the capability for end users to have instantaneous collaboration and communication or to deliver feedback and actually feed that back into your content management systems or the opportunity for collaboration or activity management and ticket notification. It definitely makes sense. But make sure that you have your core in place first.

Jerome Nadel: Absolutely. And I see questions coming in now. Please I encourage you to continue and a lot of them are coming at you Ed. So get prepared.

Ed Sander: Sure.

Jerome Nadel: Let's close and we'll move on and reserve the remainder of time in to question and discussion. So in conclusion, again strategic usability and its practical implication and I hope as we move to the slide on Be strategic! That this notion within user center design of challenge what the organization wants involves stake holders. Don't just focus on the user interface was really the under story of this story. This case study reflected not just a usability practitioner's view of design, but an understanding of what would success mean. How do we involve stake holders. How do we go out and take a more global perspective on underlying processes and the like. And I encourage for those usability practitioners in the audience, those purchasers of portal technology or decision makers be thinking about not just the user experience as the interface itself, but everything beyond it. And I'll close by conclusion with this slide on sustainable user centricity. And we've talked about matrix and I encourage all of you to be thinking about matrix. We started with that matrix framework and in fact one of the questions we've already received is about matrix. We will be coming to that momentarily, but the suggestion of this slide over here is think about establishing matrix and using that as a way to assess or gauge your progress or movement through time. And if you don't know where you are, it's difficult to move from there and see where you've gone.

Ed Sander: Absolutely. As we were showing and speaking to with the concept of this life cycle management and a road map that's achieved in iterative stages, your matrix also should change and evolve. Your business evolves, the adoption that you have within your user community will as well as you roll up the portal implementation. Your success criteria should also evolve as well.

Jerome Nadel: Excellent. So we'll begin with these questions and again I'm encouraging you to keep them coming. So Ed, you're in the hot seat here. So why you say role based? Did SAP's portal design also reflect regional needs?

Ed Sander: Absolutely. I mean each region and market or geography that SAP operates within has a different set of business needs. Not only do they have a different set of business needs, but there are also different employee based needs whether it's because there are cultural differences, the level of software adoption within that market, the size of the customer base, how technology is rolled and piloted out, or even individual accessibility for how individuals work within that geography. There is definitely a set of individual needs. Jerome mentioned the ethno-graphic study. That was global in scope and it was important that that was global in scope so that we could harmonize needs not only by role but also what did an account how did an account executive work differently in North America versus Japan or Australia, New Zealand, or the Russian Federation.

Jerome Nadel: In fact, that was the second part of this question for whoever asked it. For e.g. Depending on the region the sales team might want to see different kinds of information.

Ed Sander: Absolutely.

Jerome Nadel: Okay, so and you have just spoken to that. Let me come to the second question over here. Does SAP encourage employees to use the collaboration knowledge sharing tools on their portal?

Ed Sander: Yes, absolutely. Initially, whenever you are rolling out a new functional tool, even if through best laid plans, you believe that the ability and the support that's going to give to the individual is fairly intuitive. It always makes sense to over publicize that. Just think about it's a new product that you have to sell and there needs to be a commercial around it. We found that it helps when you over communicate the actual benefits that they can expect to receive. So for e.g. one of the things I mentioned was a 24 x 7 hot line that we have that employees can access through the portal. It's all electronic, but they can also go to traditional of line modes and just pick up the telephone or send an email versus interacting directly through the portal. We had an informer show when we launched that. It was directly placed on the home page. We had executive sponsorship that clearly communicated the benefits for using that service. We pushed out reports. We encouraged individuals to give us feedback for their success stories and then we would also showcase these individuals so that there was a little talking head. There was an account executive telling them giving the instance of how they received information for the sales call that they had the next day at 10 o' clock at night and how much it really contributed to the efforts they had with their customer. But individual promotion of any individual components of the portal that will help to achieve adoption is definitely a best practice.

Jerome Nadel: We find the same to be true even in building usability infrastructure. When you are creating standards in the like it's important to communicate all those to internally advertise and promote. There needs to be an internal marketing campaign about and the intent is once people experience using it, they'll realize it's inherent value and adoption and utilization will increase.

We shift to a different orientation. Do best practice portals or internal portals differ from outward facing customer portals such as e-commerce interface?

Well, I'll begin and then ask you to give your comments on that as well. You know clearly as we talked about roles, portals are about roles. The roles are very different. The internal user is really captivated by this is the tool, this is where I work. It's not kind of a self serve dynamic where I can electively go from one area to another. So it's really more of an environment of utility. And again, it's important that we respectfully give in the discussion of company versus me to the extent that you can embrace that philosophy of give me what I need and easy, efficient access aggregated and integrated to complete my tasks, that should be the directed goal. Where clearly when you look at customer facing, there are often opportunities for them to go somewhere else. So the notion of adoption and conversion and how do I demonstrate the value proposition immediately, the key there is to at first instance demonstrate immediate value. So pulling that immediate utility upto the top so that it can complete the tasks that are most typically done becomes the mandate of the customer facing portal where it might be a little bit deeper within the framework of arguably the more complex and larger internal portal.

Ed Sander: Yeah, absolutely. Communicating value at the top so it's really literally the first message that a customer sees when they are coming to your website or to your online exchange or your portal is really pre-eminent in importance. Because you don't have a captive audience that you do internally with your employee base. To an extent, employees can choose not to use the portal, but it really is important to communicate value within the first seconds of interaction.

Jerome Nadel: I agree completely. So Ed, another one for you. Ed Sander:, how do your legal and HR departments possibly manage risk when you increase access to publishing by your users? Excuse me, long sentence over here. How do your legal and HR departments possibly manage risk when increased access to publishing by your users is increasingly afforded to them? How does this impact data legacy and retention policy?

Ed Sander: Here, certainly, risk mitigation is a very important component to any portal strategy and it was really one of the reasons when Jerome and I were discussing this conversation today that I fell back on some organizational and foundational components, both in terms of practices in technology as being fundamental elements of an effective portal. So when I was talking about those three pillars, content management is very important not only for the ease that it creates with search or employee access to information when you have a very informed informational architecture and meditated structure, but when you have a well-structured content supply chain within your firm, that goes outside of the technology that you are using to enable that so that its very clear who are the individuals within the company that have access to create information as information producers, who are the individuals that manage that on an ongoing and persistent basis. Tagging individual pieces of information or documents with retiring dates and having a triggering process so that you go back and revisit that information not just when the system tells you that information is becoming dated, but so that you can also react to a market event. And then having a system of reporting and dash board analysis and analytics in place so that you can understand how the information is being accessed and the feedback that you're receiving from customers, partners, employees are utilizing that information. There is a way to mitigate risk within the context of delivering information on a continual basis through a portal. But you need to have an effective information and content management processes and the architectural infrastructure in place to support that.

Jerome Nadel: There are really two halves to that equation. One half is what should be published in terms of risk mitigation and then what is dated and should we still have it. And you know as we start and the next question actually that came in that I'll speak to around 2.0 when you look at that notion of a structured social classification, there's always going to need to be some taxonomical structure. So from a publishing perspective, is this good and where does it go? But on the utilization side, one of the inherent values of enabling the social network to contribute is things that are good from a tag cloud perspective are going to be big. More people are using these that come to the top. So you could look in more classical analytical framework, Ed, usage logs and the like and make decisions based on that as a data to the point that we should just archive it or you could be more dynamic and allow the users to say this is of value. And it's not just that they voted high, its that it was part of discussion threads and it becomes a living dynamic.

Ed Sander: Yeah. And user feedback does not end when you complete the ethno-graphic study at the front end of a portal design process. It is something that you continue on as a best practice that you use to manage the information.

Jerome Nadel: So the next question over here. Did employees voluntarily get involved or did you find some encouragement was necessary for the web 2.0 oriented facilities? How did you encourage employees to participate?

So again, when we transition to the end, we were just talking about current trends. The collaboration that we spoke to was really at the kind of pre 2.0 but this timeline is a bit gray. So do you want to take that from an SAP perspective, and then I could talk more generally or?

Ed Sander: Sure, absolutely. We trial this, you know, when we begin with the portal project we definitely had pilot communities that we rolled out pieces of the functionality to. But that's also something that we've continued. The road map that Jerome showed has continued on and we use that to test new individual pieces of technology that really ride on the coat tails of 2.0 capabilities. Individual port-lets and applets that physically exist outside of the portal but through enterprise services or architecture and SAP technology are able to communicate really in a streaming continuous fashion. We don't roll these out globally, but we do trial them with individual communities. When you create these instances of advocates of new technologies or new developments within the portal, you immediately not only achieve the objective that we just discussed of having end-user feedback at the front end but you also create an automatic user community that helps to facilitate roll out.

Jerome Nadel: But design itself, and I suggested this before, you know the interface is the medium to influence end-user behavior. So even in that schematic that I share that suggested when you ultimately get to a document, an artifact, the kernel of knowledge either through search or through browse, that container should provide and afford the ability to interact in 2.0 like interaction model. So this is interesting. Let me talk to the author. Let me get into a discussion group. Is there any kind of Wiki or log associated with this? Can I have an RSS feed to say when any thing like this comes out I want to get it. The design itself is the opportunity to influence how end users interact. And you know with that of course socially and culturally the idea of good introduction and executive edict that this is important and move forward is important but good design rules in that way as well.

Ed Sander: And your portal can help to influence that culture within the company. SAP I think that cultural tendency is a little more prevalent because it is a European company where that's just one of the more (inaudible) where we operate within the fabric of the company.

Jerome Nadel: Okay. Coming towards the end on questions over here. We'll speak to this one over here. I understand the multiple measurements for improvement. But my management wants one simple understandable metric to assess our success and continued budget, does one exist? What do you recommend?

Ed Sander: Well, I'll give you some just initial thoughts that I had going back to that. I think it's important that your metric is really is one that really encapsulates the story. When we were talking about dash boards, there are a sea of individual metrics that you can look to. So without knowing all this the dynamics the first things that come to mind if I were to have that as my own question that I had to resolve for my management would really be to look back to what role is the portal playing within the corporation. Is it serving a specific employee population? Is it important to the company that it rolls out a new product and achieves market awareness. There are depending on the business objective that you are looking for, you can line up a series of individual inflection points that contribute towards achievement of that objectives. Ultimately, if your management is looking for a singular objective, I would recommend that you take it back to one of the fundamental business objectives that the company has for your fiscal year, but then very clearly show the story or the series of inflection points that really contribute towards improved productivity and efficiency that help that company to achieve that business objectives.

Jerome Nadel: Absolutely. And it's not just about content so you know to speak singularly that search goes down because content is accessible in context of performing tasks. You know, there are different metrics depending on what these success criteria are and I think the big thing there is to go back and ask what is success and then define the metric from that. The other thing that I think is important in continuously pulsing the user community is to ask the e-survey on the portal how are things going? Are we improving? And continually look at the progress that you are making in terms of user acceptance, adoption, positive feedback. I think we are coming towards time over here. I just wanted to encourage you for your colleagues that weren't able to participate in this session this morning. I know we are doing this primarily for Europe. There will be another live webcast from New York at 3:30 Eastern Daylight time. Finally again, there is a white paper on HFI's website as well as this webcast will be archived and up on our site in about 2 weeks. And with that, Ed, I want to thank you very much for this morning session.

Ed Sander: Thank you very much.

Jerome Nadel: We will be doing it again in a set of hours. Thank you. Have a good day.

So with that let's move in to questions. One that has come in repeatedly and these are being handed over to us is will this presentation be available after the webcast?

Typically, logistically about 2, 3 weeks following these will be uploaded to our site with the ability to download the webcast. As I suggested before, there is a supporting case study on the HFI website as well. So about 2 to 3 weeks look for that.

Another question that had been asked by more than one of you is from start to finish how long did the study, design, test, and implementation of this new portal take? Which is a bit of an interesting question because I think you'd have to ask in fact what was the start date and what was the end date. So I have an answer. I'll let you speak to that first.

Ed Sander: Sure. Initially we had a this project started in stages. Initially during our engagement, we were focused on just one section of the portal catering really to one population within SAP, specifically the sales marketing organization. But it gradually grew over time. I think recalling from start to finish, we started off from our kick off meeting in Walldorf. It was a hot summer day, I remember that, I think in August. And I think that we actually concluded and have the portal go live in about 9 months later.

Jerome Nadel: And again, I think the key thing here is that this is an evolution. So we purposely focused on a rather broad but a dedicated finite group and said we could master this and think in terms of broad templates, we establish these templates and patterns, this could be extended to other areas and the methodological approach that we used to design that first area could be extended to others. And you were sharing with me before off line that this has extended well beyond the one area that we had.

Ed Sander: Yeah, absolutely. And again, a lot of the tools that we talked about, you don't have to wait a full year to realize the benefits from them. We had actually several components to the engagement within our project and as Jerome had mentioned, the process of iteration has continued. It was about 3 to 4 months before we actually began rolling out some of the pilot test communities within the portal and began seeing some immediate benefits. Then because of the success of those initiatives and some of the precepts that we put in place, it was expanded company wide.

Jerome Nadel: And just to come back before I move on, the actual study that led to the recommendation for information architecture and design was really less than, it was about 8 to 10, 9 week time. It was very aggressive and that was a mandate from the board down. You let us know right away on that lovely day in August that you guys better hurry up, which is not uncommon for me, you know.

Next question over here, can you give some specific, can you give a) specific example of how to use a portal as a work place for transactions following on, are these transactions HR related or job specific? How do you deal with window management? So it's a bit of a loaded question. Do you want to take that?

Ed Sander: So, I'll give you a scenario for e.g. that we enabled for some of our front line sales people, the actual sales representatives themselves. There are a couple of things that are most important. I certainly learnt throughout this process, but I think these are true qualities for most sales individuals. What they want to know during the individual quarter was how close are they to meeting their quota, who is helping them, were the leads coming that they can use to deliver on their quota? And then when they have a question in the middle of a deal cycle, what's the information that they need that's quick and easy to access or who can they go to to ask the right question. So within the portal we created a specific role for the account executive within SAP. It was catered to the account executives that we had within each region, within each industry, and by product area that we support. So Jerome had mentioned a lot of the individual ethno-graphic end-user behavior studies. All of those helped us to develop a palette of flavors really that we used to deliver different lenses or filters for this account executive role. We enabled the account executive to go directly into our CRM system that was plugged in at the back end of the portal so that they can immediately check their pipeline to see how they were performing against the quota, what was their bonus going to be? Were they on track to make club for the end of the year? They could also look just in general how was their team performing. And more importantly, their sales director and their manager could as well. When they encountered difficulty in an individual deal, if there was a question that was asked because it was a new implementations of one of SAP's products and they needed to ask a question, we had information very intuitively organized by product so that they could look at the individual solutions if they were being asked. We created a couple of very simple querying tools so that they didn't have to navigate through the entire portal, but there was an interface. I have a meeting with the director of sales for added pharmaceuticals in Chicago, I have an hour for the meeting. What are the key points that I need to deliver? They were able to access that content. When there were questions that came, we created again using more of our CRM functionality, a 24 hour hot line that was automated and delivered directly through the portal. So stepping back, this is an example of how we were able to marry individual information relevant for that i.e. selling into a specific account with the task that they performed everyday to access direct information in content relevant to that specific task that they had. We also delivered additional querying capability that related back to their own role, their function as an individual. And also additional tools that allowed them to collaborate with other experts throughout the company.

Jerome Nadel: And as well things like self-survey, HR, and then I'm a manager of others. Let me go to that area. You know a related part of that question was how do you deal with window management. And as we were cross portal product, we see that there are a different core frame works of navigation and then implemented frameworks of navigation. So I think what was implied around window management is am I spotting a secondary browser when I go to a functional area? How do I integrate data into given views within top level dash boards and there are some of both and you know again what we think is most critical is clearly that you're not just using the portal as a set of links to take me out to everything else, but that things are presented in context. And to the extent that you do spot a secondary, don't go too far out, but always give me a sense of place. Let me see where I am without relying on some long path of breadcrumb path menus etc.

Ed Sander: And just a final comment on that, because we had gone through the end-user feedback, because we had worked with HFI to have a palette of design templates that were role specific, we did not have to rely on window pop outs. When individual employees logged into the portal, we were already able to automatically identify them and show them their own version of the portal that catered directly to the needs they would have.

Jerome Nadel: So moving on, next question. Can you describe the team structure and resource requirements for accomplishing this within a 9-month time frame. And I could speak on the HFI side. In our typical engagement model in the executive director capacity, I sat on top. We had a project director, a lead usability analyst, a couple of specialists, and a graphics person. So a core team of about 6 folks working hand in hand but primarily virtually with the SAP team. And then on your side …

Ed Sander: On the SAP side, I had a program manager just managing all of the day to day. I had three usability experts, one director, and two managers that were HFI certified on our team. In addition, we also had people that knew our portal technology. I think that's very important. It's important to understand what's technically feasible. So we had that within the context of our team. And then we relied on very strong relationships with our subject matter experts, those that represented different geographies, different product areas, and different customer segments. All in all, a team that was assigned to this project from SAP was about 6 to 8 individuals throughout the course of the engagement.

Jerome Nadel: This is an interesting question over here. There's a set of them so it's difficult to pick between. User training seems to be a recurrent road block to establishing me centric design in my organization. How do you approach user training and I presume that this is a general employee within the organization to get them to understand and embrace this notion of me centricity.

Ed Sander: I think that, well, you know, user training really is a part of just the overall portfolio offering that we had as one of the as really the roll out process for the portal. It was really important as we were asking people to migrate from one internet that they had become very familiar with even though they had created a lot of work around it. So it was important that they understood what was going to be delivered to them, where to find the information so we created a number of tools, self-running demos that were delivered. There was a communication campaign. And we actually had individual calling sessions where we literally walked to people through with the elements of the portal that were specific to their organizational role within the company.

Jerome Nadel: I would say that good design me centricity mitigates the requirement for training. It's self evident. It's intuitive. It matches what I expect to happen. And again, this is an organizational chain from having to go to the siload structure to get what I need. Now it's a world where based on who I am when I come in what I need is there for me. So a little bit of education about the shift in approach, but I think the adoption and embracing this view of design we find from the usability test perspective and just anecdotes of satisfaction that this shift is not going to be problematic. People will say why didn't we do this sooner.

Ed Sander: Most of it was communication as well.

Jerome Nadel: If you had to name the single most successful aspect of the project, what would it be? And let me take this first because you know clearly HFI works with a lot of clients, premier clients like SAP. And what's most exciting for us beyond the collaboration to come up with an interface with a presentation layer is sharing this approach of user centric thinking and its inherent business value and the process the business implications that it suggests. And you know I want to thank you, because you were really a facilitator to bring us to that executive view to enable us to push that through. And I think again for me the single most successful aspect wasn't just perceived as a usability initiative. It was perceived more as a strategic comparative where we collaborated around what success would mean.

Ed Sander: And from my perspective, I think the hallmark of success for this project at SAP was that we now had an information work place that individuals, at the individual level, regardless of whether they were in product development, marketing, sales, HR, finance felt they had a portal that was catered directly to their needs. It increased adoption. And the reason that it did that is because we delivered not just one massive channel, but we delivered a series of interactive channels that were individually catered to specific roles within the company on the same platform. While you were aware that it was the SAP corporate portal to every single employee that operates within an organizational entity, it is the portal that caters directly to their needs.

Jerome Nadel: I guess we will take this last question and I know there are more coming in and one of the things we discussed and we'll be announcing this later is potentially the idea to open up the discussion board around. As this is something that we'd like to move toward. And Ed I am sure you would volunteer to collaborate in that type of large approach.

Ed Sander: Sure.

Jerome Nadel: So again we don't want to over commit on that, but a lot of questions are coming in and we're coming to close. So with that last question over here. Are you seeing evidence of this new information architecture you refer to being used for internet self-service applications? For e.g. online banking. So yes, in fact, we do a lot of financial sites in on line banking site design as well. And you know the challenge is there what is the difference between the flat view, the non authenticated view, and then the authenticated view. Because arguably when you come to an internet site that you can authenticate to, it is a portal. The challenge, the difference over here is the size and complexity of the information space you're in. When you go to online banking, there's a finite set of things you can do. And as an employee with multiple roles within an organization like SAP, the space is much larger. And that size adds to complexity. So the same core theme of give me what I need in context and reflect that it is about me and give me the things that are important to me absolutely applies. But I think the challenge is a bit greater.

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