We live in a world of bet­ter soft­ware, and it’s part­ly because the soft­ware we have today is more sen­si­tive to the way we want to use appli­ca­tions and data services.

As recent­ly as a decade ago, users with their head in deep trans­ac­tion­al sys­tems of the type SAP is known for would be required to engi­neer the fab­ric of those appli­ca­tions to get them work­ing and func­tion­ing in the way they want­ed. That’s not the case today. 

SAP T‑Code History

Appli­ca­tion engi­neer­ing in the SAP world came down to the use of trans­ac­tion codes. Some­times known as t‑codes, they are a way of short­cut­ting and pre­pro­gram­ming appli­ca­tion func­tion cus­tomiza­tions that would oth­er­wise have to have been ini­ti­at­ed using menu navigation.

As use­ful as appli­ca­tion menus of any kind are, they have their short­falls. Menus can be time-con­sum­ing to work through, they can shel­ter hid­den func­tions from users in deep­er sub­menu options, and they often fail to con­nect mul­ti­ple func­tions in one sin­gle step. Back in the day (and remem­ber we’re talk­ing not much past the year 2000), SAP viewed t‑codes as a super-use­ful func­tion­al quick­step, much like short­cuts and macros that you might find in oth­er well-known oper­at­ing systems.

While use of t‑codes across the SAP land­scape will undoubt­ed­ly hang around in some deploy­ments for many years, the company’s efforts to auto­mate a high­er degree of that appli­ca­tion engi­neer­ing for users in real-world use cas­es has char­ac­ter­ized many of its prod­uct inno­va­tions in recent times.

Con­sumer-Grade Experiences

Today’s busi­ness users expect con­sumer-grade expe­ri­ences in their day-to-day use of busi­ness appli­ca­tions. SAP has been push­ing toward that evo­lu­tion with some major plat­form changes, devel­op­ments, and acquisitions.

First intro­duced in 2013, SAP Fiori aimed to pro­vide con­sumer-style appli­ca­tion expe­ri­ences for com­mon busi­ness func­tions from the start. By mak­ing busi­ness appli­ca­tions work and look more like con­sumer appli­ca­tions, SAP’s mis­sion was to bring all staff mem­bers into con­tact with ERP func­tions and tools.

SAP Fiori is now known for its ease-of-use route to busi­ness func­tions includ­ing vaca­tion leave request approvals, trav­el expense man­age­ment, timesheet data, sales order cre­ation, cus­tomer invoic­ing, pur­chase order track­ing, and more. The con­cept is sim­ple: If we can make these func­tions easy enough for any user (often in a mobile app), then why should the admin and finance depart­ments of any busi­ness need to shoul­der the bur­den of work­ing in code? If users take con­trol of these tasks, they get them exe­cut­ed faster, the busi­ness runs more effi­cient­ly (and typ­i­cal­ly more prof­itably), and every­one has a bet­ter experience.

Expe­ri­ence as a Technology

So, that expe­ri­ence word has pro­gressed. What was once a hard-cod­ed ABAP devel­op­er cus­tomiza­tion, even­tu­al­ly became an intri­cate menu instruc­tion. What was once an intri­cate instruc­tion even­tu­al­ly became a trans­ac­tion code. What was once a trans­ac­tion code, became an SAP Fiori design lan­guage instruc­tion to cre­ate a role-based con­sumer-grade user experience. 

But there is still more ​“expe­ri­en­tial” progression.

SAP Fiori clear­ly con­tin­ues to be a strong part of SAP road map devel­op­ment strate­gies. But the expe­ri­ence-cen­tric know-how that SAP Fiori has ampli­fied is now joined by the expe­ri­ence man­age­ment tech­nol­o­gy that SAP brought in with its pur­chase of Qualtrics XM in late 2018. As SAP not­ed in an offi­cial state­ment about the acqui­si­tion, ​“Expe­ri­ence data (X‑data) focus­es on obtain­ing and tap­ping the val­ue of out­side-in cus­tomer, employ­ee, prod­uct, and brand feed­back. Com­bin­ing Qualtrics’ expe­ri­ence data and insights with unpar­al­leled oper­a­tional data (O‑data) from SAP soft­ware will enable cus­tomers to man­age sup­ply chains, net­works, employ­ees, and core process­es better.”

This all comes back to the very first line in this sto­ry. Soft­ware can now be more sen­si­tive to the way we want to use it. This means that appli­ca­tions can be more aware, more attuned, and more cog­nizant of what the user base demands.

XM Now Comes of Age

Build­ing Expe­ri­ence Man­age­ment (XM) into mod­ern appli­ca­tion stacks means users help shape the evo­lu­tion of appli­ca­tions them­selves. Sud­den­ly the IT depart­ment can start talk­ing about XM-design strat­e­gy and begins to look at what users think at a far more gran­u­lar lev­el than was ever even pre­vi­ous­ly possible. 

The IT depart­ment is now real­iz­ing that users are also cus­tomers. The notion of allow­ing cus­tomers to shape the way your own inter­nal appli­ca­tions work is arguably a pret­ty sig­nif­i­cant step com­pared with how this has hap­pened in the past. This is not require­ments man­age­ment for soft­ware sys­tems that are going to mar­ket; this is XM analy­sis from the inside out, and now, from the out­side in, too.

ASUG mem­bers might be won­der­ing, ​“How do I for­mu­late an XM strat­e­gy? Where do I start first? ​“Is this an SAP-only play in terms of tech­nol­o­gy plat­forms? Are there any major guide­lines and method­olo­gies to be aware of?” We are cer­tain­ly aware that it’s not an SAP-only play. But stay­ing with­in the realms of what SAP is doing with Qualtrics XM, there are four major pil­lars where XM must be applied. And it’s gen­er­al­ly going to be a pret­ty silo-bust­ing expe­ri­ence to make all four happen.

The Four Pil­lars of XM

Expe­ri­ence engi­neer­ing needs to be evi­denced across:

• Employ­ees: We need to know how peo­ple feel about the tech­nol­o­gy they use to per­form their jobs every day and what they think would help them work better.
• Cus­tomers: This is per­haps the eas­i­est area to see, as we expe­ri­ence this every time we get a sur­vey after an air­line flight or give our feed­back on our encounter with a cus­tomer ser­vice agent. In this hyper-com­pet­i­tive world, the cus­tomer is at the cen­ter dri­ving many busi­ness choices. 
• Prod­uct: We need to find out what aspects of prod­uct (or ser­vice) per­for­mance our users want more of, less of, or some­thing dif­fer­ent instead of. (Do these sneak­ers, fry­ing pans, movie ser­vices, or bagels make you feel good and want more, or do they deliv­er a flat experience?)
  
• Brand: we actu­al­ly want to know how cus­tomers and employ­ees feel about the brand that is pre­sent­ed to market. 
  

Over­all then, we can be safe in stat­ing that XM has come of age. We’ve all heard of the con­sumer­iza­tion of IT. Nobody dis­putes the need for intu­itive usabil­i­ty in every tech­nol­o­gy. After all, when was the last time you read an instruc­tion manual? 

Expe­ri­ence man­age­ment builds loy­al­ty for long-term plat­form adop­tion and has been used since the dawn of time for every busi­ness (or indeed human) trans­ac­tion ever made from pio­neer­ing fron­tiers­man traders to the shop­keep­ers and gen­er­al store own­ers of the post-war years through the 1950s and onward. There’s no rea­son expe­ri­ence shouldn’t keep rein­vent­ing itself for the dig­i­tal age. Now it just has.