Insights

Let the work flow! - Part 2

24 Aug 2011 Mobile, Emerging Technologies, Consumer Business

In part 1 of this blog series I looked at what could make mobile workflow as pervasive in the business world as mobile email is today. In this blog I'd like to re-cap on what products SAP and Sybase have already shipped and what's soon to come to get us going on that journey.

Sybase Mobile Workflow for SAP Business Suite

This is one of the products that originates from the SAP / Sybase co-innovation partnership from well before Sybase was acquired by SAP. Both server and client initiated workflows are possible and the solution is already pre-integrated end-to-end with the SAP Business Suite. It runs on the Sybase Unwired Platform 1.5.5 and has device specific clients for iOS and Windows Mobile devices. The customizing capabilities, especially how decision relevant data is presented, are quite rudimentary so that in my view it is more suitable for simple approval type scenarios that do not require a lot of context information for the user to make a decision.

In SUP 2.0 the Sybase proprietary workflow form technology used by this solution has been dropped in favour of the more open and extendable "hybrid web container" approach. Although I don't see a future for the technology used, I'd quite like to see another release that delivers something similar on top of SUP 2.x, i.e. pre-integrated workflow scenarios for the SAP Business Suite that can be customized as required with the SUP toolkit.

Mobile Workflow in the Sybase Unwired Platform 2.x

As just mentioned, with SUP 2.0 Sybase has put mobile workflow onto a completely new foundation, called the "hybrid web container". The container itself is a generic, native application that replicates data with SUP and executes packages of HTML, CSS and JavaScript to render the user interface. This approach allows for much richer customization and presentation capabilities while maintaining cross-platform compatibility. With the recently released ESD 1 the device support now extends to iOS, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Android devices. In comparison to the above mentioned Sybase Mobile Workflow for SAP Business Suite - "mobile workflow" is now a much more generic platform capability and not as tightly integrated into SAP backend systems. It does need additional effort to setup the integration, but has the advantage that any other backend system can be linked in as well.

Employee Productivity Apps

At SAPPHIRE Orlando earlier this year SAP also announced a set of line of business specific productivity apps and a number of them could be classified as "mobile workflow" scenarios. From what I've seen to date they will allow users to approve leave requests, shopping carts, travel expenses, payments, etc. via standalone apps that are heavily optimized for each specific scenario. The initially targeted device platforms seem to be iOS and BlackBerry and I see them as a great way to deliver business value very, very quickly with pre-packaged, pre-integrated scenarios as long as there are no or limited requirements to customize the content.

More to come...

Having laid out the options with this blog I plan to go into more detail in future blogs of this series. In the meantime, please feel free to drop me a line with your thoughts. Would you rather implement an out-of-the-box approval app that is highly optimized for a specific scenario or a generic capability that allows you to add further scenarios as required?