Innovation

One of the challenges of being a Product Manager is ensuring that your "Product" stays competitive and in demand in the market place.

During the SAP Partner Summit this past March, Dr. Geoffrey A Moore presented a view of what this challenge really encompasses. There are four phases:

1. Invent - coming up with a novel idea or enhancement ... I prefer the term "innovation"; Dr. Moore used "invention"
2. Deploy - in my world this takes the innovation/invention and turns it into something that can be implemented/sold over and over, packaging might be a better term
3. Manage - this is the phase where the "Product" is being sold and deployed
4. Offload - at this point the "product" has reached the end of it's life and it's time to let it go.

The third phase is where most of the money is to be made. Often, though, we loose sight of the fact that this third phase will come to an end. Instead, we tend to want to stay in this phase as long as possible, trying our best to "tweak" the product and end of investing way too much to keep the products going.

In reality what we need to decide is either to re-enter the Invent phase to see what we can do to improve reinvent the product, or Offload it and find something new. This is perhaps the most crucial step for a Product Manager.

I've begun to read another book of Dr. Moore's: Dealing with Darwin. I will have more on this once I get further along.

SAP's Sapphire Conference is Coming!

We are getting excited about participating in the upcoming SAP Sapphire Conference (May 15 - 18)! Emergys will have a booth at the conference and we are planning on setting up demos of our BOBJ and Dashboard solutions. I am extremely excited by our capabilities here and can't wait to get the feedback from the participants at the conference!!

(Shhhh, by the way, rumor has it that an iPad2 give away is in the works ... so be sure to register for the conference and stop by!)

All In One Update

Wow, how time has flown! Much has happened since my last post. We successfully recertified with SAP the following key AIO solutions:

1. High Tech
2. Consumer Products
3. Wholesale

This brought each of our solutions up to the current support pack levels, tested to insure integration, proof to SAP of our testing, and concurrence from SAP that the solutions are viable.

Even more importantly, we've imbedded Business Objects into our solutions. I am extremely excited by the work that has been done here. We have built in support for Dashboards and integration with iPhone and iPad support. We can now demo each solution with BOBJ included. This is a game changer for our customers.

We've all heard that data is good, but information is better!

With BOBJ support, our customers can turn all of that SAP data into information!