Design Thinking at Enterprise Scale
SAP — an enterprise design thinking pioneer and leader
In the previous Design Impact issue, Design Leadership with targeted value, we highlighted some of the key leadership lessons shared by Andreas Hauser, SVP Global Head of Design Services and AppHaus Network at SAP Design. He discussed some of the highlights of his leadership journey and key elements that helped him forge the path for his global design team to be successful. On a slightly different perspective, this conversation focuses on the catalysts for the culture transformation at SAP and its design-thinking journey.
The CEO Keynote that changed the way we view Design Thinking
SAP has been focusing on User Experience and Design for a long time. Some of the key catalysts for its rise from the tactical to the strategic role it plays today at SAP can be traced to its founder Hasso Plattner and his interest and support for Design Thinking.
The Design Thinking journey started in 2004. Plattner, now Chairman of the Supervisory Board, delivered a keynote in front of 20,000 customers in which he talked about Design Thinking at SAP. He was inspired by an article about IDEO and Design Thinking that he read right before he went on stage. The response from the audience was overwhelmingly positive and it made it clear that Plattner was into something big.
In different interviews and speeches, Plattner talked about how he and his peers started the company. The team would sit with the customers and end users, talk to them, listen to them and do programming in a very iterative way. It wasn’t called Design Thinking at the time, but it was Design Thinking, and Plattner showed on stage how important it was, as an organization, to work with the users and the customers that way.
In just a few years, the company grew from a small team to 10-thousand employees. It became a global organization, distributed, with offshore teams, and professionals specialized in specific set of skills. With its growth came the challenge and difficulty of getting teams with the necessary skills in the same room to develop a solution in close collaboration with the users.
Plattner had the vision to recognize that SAP had to get back to being closer to the customers and users again. Design Thinking was the solution for the organization to address the challenges that a global, distributed organization represented. SAP started building up its Design Thinking capabilities at that time. Plattner brought 35 design thinkers into SAP to help making Design Thinking a strategic priority, driving innovation across the entire organization. Sam Yen, now SAP’s Chief Design Officer, was part of this initial team.
Educating design leaders for the future
In an effort to expand his vision, Plattner’s went beyond SAP to incentivize innovation and creativity in the new generation of students. He donated over $35M of his own money for the creation of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stamford, now known as the D-School. He also funded the HPI of Design Thinking in Potsdam, Germany. Both institutions, have taken a pioneering role in the development and dissemination of Design Thinking. For Plattner, it is not about a single dimension of design impact within an organization. It is about something larger, something greater, the formation of design leaders for the future.
A catalyst for culture transformation
The big culture transformation towards a user-centered perspective was sparked with the creation of the AppHaus. Started in Palo Alto as a creative space where people from design, technology, and business work together with clients and end users in a very iterative way developing consumer applications. The AppHaus was created because SAP needed to stay innovative and to respond to the needs of future users. Sam Yen, the current Chief Design Officer of SAP was leading this team at that time.
Around 2010, the consumerization of IT became a prevalent trend; with applications like Google, Facebook and the proliferation of mobile devices gave people the opportunity to have simple and easy User Experience. This was significantly different than the experience people had with enterprise software, and they started asking why enterprise software had to be more difficult to use than consumer software.
With the AppHaus, SAP wanted to address user experience concerns and to answer questions such as how to become more innovative and agile. As an organization, it was critical to evolve from an 18-month development cycle to a couple-of-weeks development cycle.
In 2013, Hauser — who reports to Sam Yen — launched the next generation of the AppHaus, the Customer Facing AppHaus, a set of creative spaces where SAP teams work directly with customers as partners to co-innovate and design solutions together. They leverage Design Thinking with a people-first approach. There are currently 4 of these spaces in Heidelberg, Berlin, Palo Alto and Seoul. A by-product of this collaboration is the change of mentality in SAP’s ecosystem. Now, many SAP customers are recognizing the need to change their own culture, to become more innovative and they have started to implement Design Thinking in their own organizations.
A board-level mandate: Deliver a consistent User Experience
Design Thinking contributed to change the mindset of how people work, but SAP needed to go a step further. To deliver innovative and easy-to-use solutions to the market, SAP concentrated its efforts in User Experience and, in a revolutionary move, about 4 years ago the company decided to apply a modern User Experience to SAP solutions.
This approach presented significant challenges given the fact that for SAP, like for many large organizations, growth through acquisition is integral to its strategy and operations. SAP has acquired many companies and cloud solutions, and design leaders like Yen need to ensure new acquired solutions and traditional SAP solutions provide a consistent experience. As a result of the board-level mandate, SAP launched SAP Fiori, a design language and framework to provide a coherent and delightful user experience to SAP users.
Over the years SAP has not only adopted a Design drived culture and Design-led development process within our own organization, but we are also scaling culture of Design to our ecosystem of customers and partners. To support over 300,000 customers and thousands of partners who develop solutions, SAP created SAP Build, a cloud based rapid prototyping and user research tool that allows business users to design enterprise apps, collect feedback from end users and supports a Design-led development process. In this manner, SAP is supporting the ecosystem with design services, tools to scale design in their own organizations, best practices and education so they all can grow in the same direction.
Executive support is critical in transformation management
A key element in the transformation at SAP was the top management commitment that delivered the support and the budget to make it possible. “It is very difficult to exert influence and drive change at global or large-scale programs without C-Suite support,” says Hauser. The appointment of Sam Yen as head of design in 2012 followed by Chief Design Officer of SAP in 2014 provided the executive momentum needed to drive change within the company in how we built the user experience of our products, led Design Thinking engagements with customers and developed design tools such as SAP Buikd to scale design at their customers.
This is how, with a bold approach, executive support, strong talent and empowerment to exert influence and drive change over the years, SAP became a pioneer on Design Thinking and innovative User Experience solutions. SAP broke ground, leading the charge in an industry where successful case studies are becoming more visible and in which enterprise design programs are becoming a trendy topic of conversation because of their business impact.
In the next issue of Design Impact we will discuss Service Design and the role designers have in promoting its impact as a market diferentiator and the lessons learned from a established leader.
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