dante.ricci

Top 5 Reasons Public Services Organizations Should Attend SAPPHIRE NOW

Dante Ricci — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 18:40:47 GMT

David Letterman has his famous “Top 10” list, but we need just 5 reasons to convince you to join us at SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG Annual Conference, being held in Orlando, FL, May 14-16.

1. Choose from 34 different Public Sector, Higher Education and Defense sessions…and 24 of those sessions take place at the Public Services Forum. The Forum delivers ‘must see’ content for a specific audience segment, in a special area of the show floor, all on a single day. Forums deliver the same content our attendees would normally find at SAPPHIRE NOW, but delivered in a more convenient way. No need to search the show floor to learn about the key industry topics that are important to you.

2. Hear from Best Run Public Services organizations like the City of Boston, Stanford University, New Zealand Customs, Colorado Department of Transportation, the Wildlife Conservation Agency and more!

3. 3. Join SAP and the National Basketball Association (NBA) to help support Food for Orphans. 60 million orphans go to bed hungry every night, but, in as little as 30 minutes on-site at SAPPHIRE NOW, you can help make a difference. Join SAP and NBA Player Legends on Monday, May 13, as we help pack 285,000 meals-- an entire truckload -- destined for orphans around the world.

4. 4. Discover how Public Services organizations are transforming their organizations. Hear about innovative new ways to maximize public value and optimize limited resources. Find answers to questions such as: What solutions can I take advantage of to quickly enable progress on policy goals? How have other government organizations implemented new technologies? What experiences can others share that will help me transform my own organization?

5. 5. Network with Peers. SAPPHIRE NOW allows you to collaborate -- Collaborate and network with the entire SAP ecosystem in one location. Take advantage of the Public services Forum keynotes, theater presentations, round table discussions, demos, and networking activities focused on your needs. Learn about the latest trends, solutions, technologies, and services from SAP and our partners. Meet with SAP customers, experts, and thought leaders who understand your challenges and can help you become a “best run government”.

Still need more reasons to join us at SAPPHIRE NOW? Check out the SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG Annual Conference website. Hope to see you all in Orlando!

Do MORE with LESS… a collaborative framework for shared services execution

Dante Ricci — Fri, 04 May 2012 12:28:22 GMT

Obtaining a sustainable shared services model for government requires a collaborative approach that everyone can leverage. Here are a few suggestions for execution.

•Choose wisely – Intra/inter-agency collaboration must focus on areas that can bring the greatest benefit (i.e. combining systems with the most overlap)

•Keep it simple – organizations with unique requirements will have to compromise

•Understand the cost – to prove cost-efficiency and correctly share the cost burden

•Learn and adapt – Implement an effective feedback loop (surveys, use diagnostics, analyze key performance metrics) to continuously improve

•Adopt repeatable roadmaps – better efficiency…to cut budget intelligently without undermining services

•Leverage the best in class standards based enterprise technology that…

- Lays a solid foundation that addresses evolving policy and user needs

- Automatically obtains a reusable, scalable and interoperable platform

- Immediately addresses the persistent need for a broad set of essential resources for long term sustainment

What are some other emerging best practices that should be considered when it comes to obtaining a sustainable shared services model?

Leveraging technology innovation for a more citizen centric and open government

Dante Ricci — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 06:13:29 GMT

Better government transparency can enable greater trust in government and facilitate a more citizen centric connection. Without open government, citizens cannot garner insight into fiscal policy, program effectiveness and ultimately public value of government activities. Without transparency, citizens can’t understand why decisions were made to allocate finite resources or participate in an educated way to bring about government action.

For example, continued loss of tax payer revenues has not only increased constituent calls for additional citizens’ services but also greater transparency. Government agencies have made progress towards becoming more transparent but, open government initiatives vary greatly in accuracy, timeliness and level of openness. Many websites enable citizens to analyze information. However, many are static visualizations of how tax dollars are spent. Government organizations typically do not enable the average citizen to truly interrogate the data for greater insight. Rather, the existing technology delivers facts and outcomes from the government entities own perspective.

Government can do better…

Transparency initiatives should begin to leverage newer innovative technologies to enable citizens to gain instant access to more knowledge. New technological innovation combines the simplicity and speed of search with the trust and analytical power to provide immediate answers to time sensitive questions. Groundbreaking in memory technology can accelerate the ability for constituents to see the latest data rather than experiencing the long delays we have all come to expect. This technology enables citizens to slice and dice data to answer many unanticipated questions since they don’t have to wait for answers to their original inquiry. And, they have access to that information from anywhere via a smart mobile device.

The result… relevant information in real time to constituents where and when they want it. In turn, reducing cycles on one off inquiries from citizens to government.

Could leveraging technology innovation actually be a rare win/win situation? How can your organization empower citizens? And what would that mean?

In my next blog, we will take a closer look at transparent and agile government organizations and the technologies enabling them.

Leveraging the convergence of new technological advances to help the world run better... let me count the ways

Dante Ricci — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 11:34:21 GMT

I see lots of dialogue about how new technologies can boost productivity, help with fiscal transparency and solve problems in business. But I also believe society has an opportunity to make the world run better through a convergence of new advances in technologies like in-memory computing, analytics and mobility like never before.

So what gives us the opportunity to think about new ways to make the world run better? The answer lies in recent innovations with hardware, software and mobility technology. On the hardware side, computing speed continues to increase and price to performance is much lower than the past. Massive parallelism, scalability and throughput speed are now at our disposal. At the same time software has been developed to take advantage of these hardware advances by using a unique combination of approaches including columnar databases, compression, and parallelization of queries to optimize data access and processing. We now can perform complex calculations on real-time data, without pre-calculating aggregates or building custom reporting repositories. Additionally, the potential for high-value mobilization across the community is tremendous. Mobile technology solutions can now orchestrate data from any source and deliver it onto heterogeneous devices that operate on multiple networks and operating systems to stakeholders at all levels.

Allow me to give you a couple examples of what I think could be accomplished leveraging the convergence of these new capabilities.

Unlocking gridlock - Doesn’t seem like a huge societal problem but multiple metropolitan areas around the world face livability and pollution issues. I avoid the roads as much as possible here in the Washington DC area because road infrastructure has been unable to keep pace with new commercial and residential construction. The result is not pretty. Excessive drive times have damaged both the economy and quality of life. But what if we used a complex event processing to monitor large, dynamic data volumes via sensors on the highways and/or GPS signals from cars to truly incorporate real-time traffic speeds by location. By leveraging analytics for deeper interrogation of large, dynamic data volumes to include construction, road closure and accident information we could model alternate routes and push out notifications to mobile subscribers. Additionally, we could utilize unstructured data feeds from social media sites to determine which bottlenecks on the roads are most painful or dangerous.

Improving safety and health - What if we could quickly respond to emerging threats to health by scanning massive amounts of data from structured transactional data, sensor feeds and unstructured data feeds as they happen. We could instantly detect the spread of infectious diseases or unsafe medical devices by detecting adverse events to immediately alert health professionals.

I can think of multiple opportunities to solve problems around the world from improving airline passenger safety through real time detection of non-functioning parts on aircraft to analyzing real time unstructured texts from citizens during natural disasters to coordinate resources for a more focused search for citizens.

Let’s start the dialogue now so we can together help our world run better. What use do you think could be accomplished by leveraging the convergence of in-memory computing, analytics and mobility to help the world run better?

For more news and updates on public sector trends, follow @SAPPublicSector on Twitter and follow @SAPNorthAmerica on Facebook

Leveraging the Business Process Platform to Enable Military Personnel to Find & Focus on the Right Information in Hostile Environments

Dante Ricci — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:25:23 GMT

The complexity of today's operating environment that defense personnel face today is daunting. Typically operations entail multi-national coalitions operating across the full spectrum of operational situations (humanitarian assistance, combat operations, disaster recovery and peacekeeping). These multi-national coalitions often become more complex because they include other organizations like weapon system suppliers who now have a presence on the battlefield. Within this new complex environment defense personnel (decision makers) are pressed for accurate, relevant, actionable information to make timely decisions in order to successfully accomplish their missions and tasks. In this environment, there is no room for second place.

However, these complex, hostile environments make it difficult for defense personnel to find and focus on the "right" information so that they can be successful. Regrettably, results are often achieved by military personnel's efforts than by underlying systems at their disposal. Traditional IT systems are internally focused, rigid and don't allow for information from a variety of systems. This of course is increasingly hard to do because of today's resource constraints.

Defense personnel need to get information in the format and device that is the most appropriate for their operating environment. They need to be able to pull information from a variety of heterogeneous systems to provide relevant accurate information. This entails moving Defense organizations from classic systems to a business process platform which can provide an agile IT architecture that can meet the needs of a truly agile Defense organization through data, synchronization and consistency across the many different sources of information

Though each Defense organization will have to take their own path to information transparency and communication I believe every Defense organization needs to start their journey building out a true enterprise business process platform based on an open standards based architecture which can enable the necessary cross-collaboration with coalition members, suppliers, and partners.

Transforming the coalition network won't be easy. Organizations will need to build new processes and extend existing business processes to other internal organizations and possibly coalition and Defense partners.

I believe however that SAP could be a core enabler for this journey towards "Decision Making Superiority" by providing the building blocks via a flexible business process platform with a comprehensive IT technology platform and off the shelf capabilities that enable interoperability between coalition members and partners as well as providing end-to-end process integration and automation. SAP provides many of the components for the intertwined network of people, organizations and resources.

Its about compressing the decision cycle time to provide a response that is appropriate for the need with trustworthy information from a variety of sources on a device the warfighter is utilizing or is most comfortable.

Utilizing Cross Industry Composite Applications to solve Defense Issues

Dante Ricci — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 18:12:30 GMT

Utilizing Cross Industry Composite Applications to solve Defense Issues

In my last blog titled "Why not use the Composite Application framework [CAF] to quickly fill any Defense application need?" I described how composite applications could unify people and processes with a smart integration platform that hides underlying system complexity which in turn enables the organizational synergy Defense organizations need. I also communicated that since composite applications ran across multiple existing applications and information sources, they drove critical end-to-end processes across heterogeneous systems in accordance with organizational strategy.

The intent of my first blog however was based on the idea that Defense customers can use enterprise services to build out new composite apps from scratch. I did not discuss the fact that Defense customers could take advantage of composite applications that have already been developed for other situations. In this blog I would like to explore that very possibility by giving a clear example of how Defense organizations can utilize one or multiple composite applications as building blocks to facilitate business innovation while leveraging their existing resources. The example I chose has been already created utilizing this tactic for the US Base Realignment and Closure program.

Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) is the process the US DoD is using to reorganize its installation infrastructure. BRAC provides funding for readiness, modernization, and quality of life and ensures that base structure facilitates, rather than impedes, the transformation of the military. This is not the first time the US military has gone through a BRAC process and in past rounds they used different systems for facility management, financial management, program management and project management which made it difficult to consolidate costs and comply with legislative requirements. This also led to unclear estimation of cost, time and capacity as well as an overall lack of information and performance metric visibility.

To alleviate these and other BRAC issues the military needs a solution set that can run on top of their multiple heterogeneous systems and can combine information from multiple sources to provide accurate timely information to the right organization and stakeholder. The military could also benefit by standardizing many of their functional business processes.

Many standard SAP applications solutions can handle allot of the requirements. However, many of the different Defense organizations that participate in the BRAC initiative use different systems and it would be difficult to get them to agree to a common database, data structure or to utilize one standard program management system. Additionally, the cost of ripping out their existing systems and replacing it with an enterprise solution would not be cost effective and would never be able to be stood up in time to meet the legislative BRAC compliance deadlines.

However, SAP composites could help by allowing the Defense department to utilize a technology solution that can combine information from multiple sources and provide rapid access to accurate information. It would provide this highly scrutinized and visible effort a platform for congressional and department oversight and also enable accountability at the federal, department, service, installation and state and local levels.

With these issues in mind we (some other SAP colleagues and I) looked at the existing composite applications portfolio and pulled out two composite applications (SAP Resource and Portfolio Management [xRPM] and SAP Emissions Management [xEM]) that could be utilized across the BRAC effort to provide an integration platform for role-based performance reporting, enterprise project portfolio management and environmental mitigation. The solution could conserve the resources that would typically be used for data conversion and mining as well as provide additional capabilities that are not available throughout the Defense enterprise today. These two composites could be quickly implemented and configured to provide a role-based project dashboard that can report on BRAC progress at the program, installation, service or OSD level as well as provide a common platform for collaboration and communication and provide analytics delivered out of the box for monitoring and managing all aspects of the BRAC initiative.

xRPM can be easily configured to apply to BRAC Program/Project Management requirements. xRPM can give a complete overview of the BRAC program including planned, proposed and current projects and can assign clear responsibilities and commitments on project deliverables (e.g. tasks, due dates etc.). It also has the unique ability to force standards (templates, WBS, processes, procedures) across multiple enterprises and can utilize feeder systems to provide a role based view of real-time information. xRPM comes with out of the box bidirectional integration not only with other SAP products but also Microsoft projects which many installations use today.

xEM which was initially built to monitor emissions can be configured to manage environmental compliance including identification and remediation so that installations can turn over unused land to local entities without environmental problems. xEM can also generate the required documents and forms within regulated time frames and can work in conjunction with xRPM so that BRAC projects address all environmental requirements within the same system.

By configuring these two existing composite applications the US Defense Department could quickly manage key performance indicators at all levels, rationalize BRAC with the new defense strategy and enhance visibility, compliance and control. Both of these composites could execute flexible workflow and business processes irrespective of underlying infrastructure which can accelerate return on investment by leveraging what is already in place.

Since these two composite applications are based on services already provided by other functional components and combine available service operations with new application logic and business process orchestration they not only can help with the current BRAC initiative but they could also give Defense organizations a transformational tool set for other current and future initiatives. This in turn increases the militaries level of adaptability which can evolve to support different efforts as requirements change.

Why not use the Composite Application framework (CAF) to quickly fill any Defense application need?

Dante Ricci — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 16:31:41 GMT

I keep seeing Defense RFI’s and RFP’s hitting the streets for custom build to spec solutions. Yet few of these solicitations take into account the latest technologies that can drastically reduce the cost and complexity of building a solution that quickly can meet their needs. One such technology that can allow Defense organizations who work with a multitude of heterogeneous processes and systems to rapidly respond to new business realities is the Composite Application Framework (CAF). The Composite Application Framework is part of SAP’s NetWeaver CE (composition environment). SAP Netweaver CE not only includes the Composite Application Framework tool for service composition but also includes the SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio tool for developing Java applications, the Web Dynpro development environment for user-interface development and the SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer tool for the creation of portal content and analytics applications. The synergy of the combined functionality makes it easier for developers and business process experts to collaborate and to accelerate business process innovation. The development artifacts (code, models, metadata) are more easily shared to reduce development time, effort, and cost. The Composite application Framework allows you to build composite applications that sit on top of existing applications and reuse existing functionality by utilizing service calls performed through web services. They can enable our Defense customers to propel forward while transforming their business towards an Enterprise SOA vision. By using SAP’s composite application framework Defense customers are provided a methodology as well as a comprehensive set of tools to manage and develop composite applications efficiently. Using composite applications for new development requests or business process changes can help organizations to leverage their existing IT investment, while driving the development of new and/or simplified business processes. Defense organizations are struggling with the problem of disaggregated processes spawned by the multiplicity of systems. As a result, they need increased collaborative functionality, access to actionable business intelligence, and adaptive end-to-end business processes so that formerly isolated employees and systems can work in a cross-functional manner to achieve common objectives. Composite applications deliver on this need by unifying people and processes with a smart integration platform that hides underlying system complexity and enables the kind of organizational synergy Defense organizations need. They run across multiple existing applications and information sources, driving critical end-to-end processes across heterogeneous systems in accordance with organizational strategy. They execute flexible workflow and business processes irrespective of underlying infrastructure enabling a flexible enterprise and accelerate return on investment by leveraging what is already in place. Composite applications are based on services already provided by other applications or functional components. They combine available service operations with new application logic, user interfaces, and business process orchestration. These services can be provided via SAP’s new Business Process Platform through SAP’s enterprise SOA shipments or service-enabled third-party solutions (service-enabled = self-contained enterprise functionality accessible via the Web Services standard). Lets take a look at an example of a defense organization’s need for a solution to define Religious support processes to provide Religious Support missions for military units and commanders. It may also define the processes for tracking, reporting, and maintaining information as it relates to what religious support has been provided. Traditionally, a defense organization would choose utilize IT professionals to develop a brand new custom application to meet these specific requirements. Why not use the Composite Application framework (CAF) to quickly fill this application need? If a Defense organization were to leverage the functional components already built within their legacy applications (ERP, CRM, GIS…) that are accessible in a services repository they could quickly assemble (design, execute, and monitor) via the guided procedures provided within the composite application framework to model a new composite application. By assembling existing services (a.k.a. functional components) and putting an appropriate user interface you could inexpensively achieve the new process requirements and eliminate some of the custom interfaces and/or batch processes to accommodate those requirements. Additionally, it could reduce the traditional need for constant support by IT professionals to make sure the interfaces to each application are kept up to date due to legacy system upgrades, updates and other changes to the IT landscape. If defense organizations continue to build a myriad of heterogeneous systems that are inflexible and expensive to maintain we may further impede the process improvements we are looking for. The composite application framework and other newer technological breakthroughs can alleviate allot of their pain. For more information about the composition environment please go to The Composition Environment Homepage For information how one of SAP’s customers uses the SDN and BPX to develop composite applications go to Cardinal Health: Using SDN to Accelerate CAF

Why Enterprise Services Oriented Architecture can be a Framework for Defense Transformation

Dante Ricci — Tue, 01 May 2007 13:56:10 GMT

Keeping the competitive advantage in warfare is too compelling an activity for defense organizations to ignore. To do this militaries around the world have to be able to self synchronize in a joint & coalition war fighting environment and with broad missions such as humanitarian assistance, peace support operations, and war fighting. Self-synchronization creates an advantage by exploiting behavioral change and opinion to enable increased speed of combat power. To successfully transform into an agile military force both the force and business domains must converge and align to the mission and vision of the organization.

Given each military has its own contrasting priorities, resources and maturity level, there are many paths that could be taken to get to this seemingly unachievable elusive goal. Many Defense organizations are looking toward a solution oriented architecture approach and more specifically web services for a competitive advantage.

However, web services, while extremely versatile, need to be orchestrated and combined to create useful software solutions . From my perspective, this is where SAP’s Enterprise Solution Oriented Architecture (Enterprise SOA) provides the “business logic” or information about what web services do and how to combine them quickly to achieve a desired level of agility. By utilizing enterprise services to reduce the time it takes to move to a new business process it will enable Defense organizations to garner an architecture that is built to change with strategy and turn it into information systems that can quickly realign with the defense organizational structure and resources. Leveraging Enterprise services to provide an integrated information environment in which a wide range of Defense organizations can share data across heterogeneous systems can help garner better self synchronization and thus mission effectiveness.

The question is how to make this a reality given the competing priorities. Technology alone can not bring this vision to fruition. Rather it is one component of many that enables transformation to occur. The appropriate organizational structure, concept of operations and supporting systems need to have the right coordinated mix to help Defense organizations become increasingly agile.