Today, if you need a brand­ing label for your new tech­nol­o­gy plat­form, all you need to do is insert an inspi­ra­tional, dynam­ic, and thought-pro­vok­ing descrip­tive term before the word enterprise.

Tech­nol­o­gy ven­dors are espous­ing the data-dri­ven enter­prise, the self-dri­ving enter­prise, the auto­mat­ed enter­prise, and the (plain and sim­ple) smart enter­prise. SAP is fol­low­ing suit and coined the term intel­li­gent enterprise.

SAP defines intel­li­gent enter­pris­es as those that ​“effec­tive­ly use their data assets to achieve their desired out­comes faster — and with less risk, so it’s all about automat­ing com­plex busi­ness process­es around a unit­ed core of mas­ter data in the cloud.”

Have We Grad­u­at­ed Yet?

It has been a year since SAP pushed for­ward the con­cept of the intel­li­gent enter­prise. But what does the phrase mean now, and what’s on the hori­zon next? 

Let’s first remind our­selves how keen SAP is to shake off its ​“just an ERP com­pa­ny” rep­u­ta­tion. It insists that a tru­ly intel­li­gent enter­prise is one with SAP Cloud Plat­form at the cen­ter of an oper­a­tional foun­da­tion that has radi­al arms out to as many of the oth­er core SAP tech­nol­o­gy stacks as pos­si­ble. This includes: SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors for HR; SAP Ari­ba for pro­cure­ment; SAP Field­glass for ven­dor man­age­ment; SAP Con­cur for expense man­age­ment; and (of course) SAP S/4 HANA and SAP C/4HANA for ana­lyt­ics and CRM, respec­tive­ly. Along with API con­nec­tiv­i­ty to oth­er soft­ware com­po­nents and ser­vices, SAP Leonar­do also is in the mix for pro­duc­tized work­shop pro­to­typ­ing and design thinking.

Amus­ing­ly, SAP also draws small­er bub­ble exten­sions to show where cus­tomers might be using third-par­ty tech­nolo­gies. Per­ish the thought, right?

The point is that it’s sup­posed to be a com­plete ecosys­tem of inter­con­nect­ed, sym­bi­ot­ic, and rec­i­p­ro­cal tech­nolo­gies that inte­grate seam­less­ly inside the SAP wheel­house. So then, the ques­tion is: What exact­ly should ASUG mem­bers pay atten­tion to, and where should they look to rein­vent their busi­ness process­es and wider approach to technology?

Take Your (Intel­li­gent) Part­ner by the Hand 

Oliv­er Huschke, glob­al head of solu­tion mar­ket­ing and exter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tions for SAP Dig­i­tal Busi­ness Ser­vices, argues that busi­ness­es need to be an intel­li­gent enter­prise and adopt the SAP cloud core-to-con­nec­tions approach. He adds that these busi­ness­es also need to sur­round them­selves with part­ner com­pa­nies that share that same vision for cloud, ana­lyt­ics, plat­form-lev­el effi­cien­cies, and data-cen­tric intelligence.

“As inter­est in intel­li­gent tech­nolo­gies — such as arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI), blockchain, machine learn­ing, pre­dic­tive ana­lyt­ics, and the Inter­net of Things (IoT) — con­tin­ues to grow, part­ners are increas­ing in impor­tance. In fact, I am find­ing that busi­ness­es on a path to becom­ing intel­li­gent enter­pris­es are build­ing and man­ag­ing a trust­ed, col­lab­o­ra­tive net­work of part­ners that offer a wide array of exper­tise and method­olo­gies,” Huschke said.

Obvi­ous­ly, that’s a nice idea con­cep­tu­al­ly, but it’s prob­a­bly quite hard to stip­u­late and enforce at any kind of extreme lev­el in prac­tice. Per­haps what Huschke is infer­ring is that look­ing out for com­pa­nies that exhib­it a gen­er­al trend toward adopt­ing con­nect­ed data intel­li­gence tech­nolo­gies is a smart move? If ASUG can deliv­er one thing, we hope it is an abil­i­ty to pro­vide a prac­ti­cal and prag­mat­ic bal­ance for approach­ing real-world SAP tech­nol­o­gy implementations.

Is Intel­li­gence Urgent?

Although we are per­haps dilut­ing Huschke’s enthu­si­asm for all-encom­pass­ing migra­tions, he does quite fair­ly make the point that there is some urgency here, and that com­pa­nies should think about wider intel­li­gence plat­form plays as a whole.

Why the urgency? Accord­ing to Huschke, ​“Because we need to bust cor­po­rate cho­les­terol…. The old­er and big­ger a com­pa­ny, the more resis­tant it is to change. Often, the work­force is stuck in a restric­tive cul­ture gov­erned by poli­cies, pro­ce­dures, lay­ers of man­age­ment, and a fear of risk — leav­ing lit­tle room for inno­va­tion and cre­ative thinking.”

If we accept the fact that enter­pris­es are being dri­ven toward a high­er lev­el of intel­li­gence, then can we put some para­me­ters on how far, deep, and wide that intel­li­gent busi­ness approach is sup­posed to span? Sind­hu Gan­gad­ha­ran, glob­al VP and head of inte­gra­tion, office of the CTO at SAP, says that an end-to-end process approach to adopt­ing what she calls ​“embed­ded intel­li­gence” is need­ed if firms are going to gain a 360-degree view on any business.

In a recent blog she wrote, she notes, ​“In order to achieve holis­tic end-to-end user expe­ri­ence, inte­gra­tion, and embed­ded intel­li­gence through­out busi­ness process­es, you need to have a great team, clar­i­ty in direc­tion, and a pri­or­i­tized list of activ­i­ties and mile­stones. My team has been work­ing on build­ing a con­sis­tent set of tech­nol­o­gy guide­lines with the goal of ensur­ing out-of-the-box inte­gra­tion, mod­u­lar­i­ty, ease of exten­sion, and con­sis­tent experience.”

Cus­tomer Validations

That’s all well and good, but can we pin­point where SAP cus­tomers are in mov­ing to become an intel­li­gent enter­prise, as well as some (if not all) of the major build­ing blocks that go to make up the SAP intel­li­gence vision?

Chris­t­ian Eigen, senior vice pres­i­dent for busi­ness appli­ca­tions at Ger­man media com­pa­ny Ber­tels­mann SE & Co KGaA, says that his com­pa­ny per­formed an SAP Readi­ness Check for SAP S/4HANA. He notes that the results helped his com­pa­ny val­i­date its path to SAP S/4HANA and accel­er­ate its deci­sion-mak­ing process. Intel­li­gence doesn’t hap­pen overnight then — a vis­it to the readi­ness clin­ic makes for longer term health here.

SAP also notes that Stara, a man­u­fac­tur­er of farm­ing equip­ment, col­lab­o­rat­ed and co-inno­vat­ed with SAP Dig­i­tal Busi­ness Ser­vices to embed intel­li­gence across its busi­ness. Stara now uses the SAP Hybris solu­tions to enable intel­li­gent sales process­es. Through SAP Enter­prise Sup­port, Stara devel­oped new intel­li­gent ser­vices to help its cus­tomers increase farm­ing efficiency.

We also can men­tion a lead­ing retail­er that co-inno­vat­ed with SAP Dig­i­tal Busi­ness Ser­vices to embed intel­li­gence into its demand mod­el­ling and fore­cast­ing process­es, using the guid­ance and sup­port of SAP Max­At­ten­tion. This pre­mi­um ser­vice is a mul­ti-year com­mit­ment that typ­i­cal­ly spans mul­ti­ple com­plex projects and deploy­ments. The above not­ed retail­er applied pre­dic­tive ana­lyt­ics and machine learn­ing capa­bil­i­ties to opti­mize its process­es, reduc­ing cost­ly over­stocks, and envi­ron­ment-impact­ing waste.

How SAP Intel­li­gence Becomes Smarter

Let’s also ask our­selves whether the intel­li­gent enter­prise has evolved for SAP? What has the com­pa­ny added to its core notion of intel­li­gence and are we now real­ly on the road to being smarter oper­a­tors? Prob­a­bly the biggest devel­op­ment in the last 12 months comes in the shape of the Qualtrics acqui­si­tion and how it fits into the SAP intel­li­gent enter­prise vision. 

We already had some of the ​“expe­ri­en­tial” fac­tor in SAP C/4HANA for cus­tomer CRM. So, Qualtrics XM sit­ting under SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors can log­i­cal­ly add to this wider employ­ee expe­ri­ence mea­sure­ment and management.

SAP talks about Qualtrics giv­ing cus­tomers the oppor­tu­ni­ty to move from basic HR oper­a­tional data (O‑data) to a more con­tex­tu­al lev­el of expe­ri­ence data (X‑data). O‑data might include basic job move­ment infor­ma­tion, but X‑data includes sen­ti­ment analy­sis, social media expres­sion, and per­son­al feel­ings from the work­force to express beliefs, emo­tions, and oth­er pre­vi­ous­ly intan­gi­ble factors.

The Human Side of Intelligence

An intel­li­gent enter­prise that only looks after its phys­i­cal assets and intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty — with­out con­cern­ing itself over the wel­fare of the human beings that go to make its sys­tems intel­li­gent in the first place — is not being very smart. That’s not an SAP line; that’s us try­ing to explain where this all comes full cir­cle with the human factor.

Final­ly, how do we get to this new point of enter­prise intel­li­gence? SAP says there are three ways. We can reimag­ine busi­ness process­es com­plete­ly from scratch; we can keep some old­er process­es but design new busi­ness mod­els to dri­ve enter­prise intel­li­gence; or we can migrate spe­cif­ic lines of busi­ness to the cloud one at a time.

Where will all this lead us in the future if we fol­low SAP’s vision? The ven­dor says that it dri­ves us toward a pos­i­tive point of what it calls ​“aug­ment­ed human­i­ty.” The argu­ment is, if enter­pris­es become more intel­li­gent, then we as humans can expand our own brains and intel­li­gence quo­tients. That’s smarter than the aver­age bear by anybody’s yardstick.

Inter­est­ed in becom­ing an intel­li­gent enter­prise? Reg­is­ter one of our many events that cov­er intel­li­gent enter­prise in SAP.