Plattner: In search of new design quality

NEW ORLEANS — Hasso Plattner looked genuinely surprised. The charismatic co-founder and former co-chief executive officer (co-CEO) of German business software vendor SAP AG, who had just arrived at the company’s Sapphire international customer conference here in New Orleans, was waving the most recent issue of BusinessWeek in his hand, pointing to the cover story on Ideo Inc., a design company based in Palo Alto, California.

“I just read this story today,” said Plattner, who in addition to his role today as chairman of SAP’s supervisory board serves as the company’s chief software advisor. “These guys are doing many of the same things we’re doing in the way of new design techniques. We even use some of the same terms, like ‘unfocus groups’ and ‘observation.’ This is incredible because I wasn’t aware of this company until now.”

In one sense, the similarity is remarkable, considering how unlike the two companies are: Ideo boasts a far-flung range of design achievements, including an insulin pen for Eli Lilly and Co., a no-squeeze, stand-up toothpaste tube for Proctor & Gamble Co. and an instant camera for Polaroid Corp. By comparison, SAP develops business applications, such as ERP (enterprise resource planning) software, which helps companies manage their business processes.

Yet, in another sense, the two companies have something in common: both see the customer at the middle of their design work, said Platter in a rare interview since stepping down as co-CEO last year. Getting to understand customers’ real needs and developing products and services that help them improve their experience with their customers is a huge challenge for designers, especially those developing complex software, he said.

Because developers in the past haven’t always fully grasped how users work, they have simply added more features for them to pick and choose, according to Plattner. The result, he said, is software that is totally “overfeatured.”

“I want to find new patterns and methodologies of how we can develop business software,” Plattner said. “I want to figure out alternative ways that can be more appropriate, that are faster and cheaper and that lead to better results.”

Composite applications, or applications that sit on top of other applications, are a big focus at SAP — and an area where Plattner believes the German software giant must tread new ground if it wants to stay ahead of the competition. “It doesn’t work to go to one programmer or to one group of programmers to develop these applications,” he said. “The design of an application sitting on top of another requires a different quality; we need to work with many different groups.”

In this context, Plattner talked about the need for “massive prototyping” or what Ideo calls “quick and dirty prototyping.” The idea, he said, is to have as many different constituencies as possible check out applications in numerous sessions. “We need to get them involved in an early stage, which doesn’t cost much before we make a decision,” he said. “And we don’t want only focus groups to be part of this process but also unfocus groups, or those who could be against a particular idea.”

The reality today, according to Plattner, is that only a few people in a room really fight over a new idea, while most others listen. “We need to ask all those individuals in that room how they can contribute,” he said. “We learned once about how group dynamics and workshops were such a great thing. I feel now that both have only a limited value; a much better value for us is to design with individuals.”

Moving ahead, Plattner said, SAP will need to design software products that take even more advantage of “the massive computer power and unbelievable networking capabilities” already available today. “We’re working on a prototype product that will allow customers to verify an invoice from millions of different database records within a second,” he said. “Speed across large amounts of data is incredibly important to businesses.”

Equally important is application integration, Plattner is quick to add. Customers, he said, want to be able to easily integrate multiple applications — for instance, one from Microsoft Corp., one from Adobe Systems Inc., another from a bank and on and on, he said. SAP needs to “bring this together” even more effectively than it does today.

So how does Plattner like his role as chief software advisor? “Exciting,” he said, “especially since I can start with prototypes and don’t have to deliver! But of course, in the end — for gratification and satisfaction — you want to see some of those babies become reality.”