What SAP could learn from social media

Dennis Howlett connects a few dots on SAP's research of social media and the possibilities for enterprise applications. Can you take something like Facebook, mash it up with SAP and get something new?

As Dennis, who anchors ZDNet's new Enterprise Irregular blog, notes it's way early to outline the possibilities. But it's a field worth considering going forward.

SAP is surveying the social media landscape and there's a good reason for the interest--social media could reinvigorate ERP. Dennis has some interesting thoughts where social media could give a helping hand to enterprise apps. Picking up that theme, here are a few more reasons why SAP may be interested in social media and how it intersects with enterprise resource planning software (ERP).

User interface: ERP's UI isn't exactly Web 2.0. By taking the processes in ERP and putting them in a format we all understand would have a serious adoption benefit.

Training costs: And if you make the UI look like all the sites we're used to guess what happens? You don't have to spend so much training people to use the system.

Knowledge management: Knowledge management is technically not a part of ERP per se, but it could be folded in. Consider the following: You're stuck in an accounts payable module. You need help. You tap a wiki for a workaround or rule--or even the justification for such as rule--and you're done.

Process widgets: Using social media techniques an ERP vendor may be able to cook down a business process (cash to order, procurement etc) down to a widget. And if you could take these blocks (that would be handy to use) couldn't you build an ERP-ish system that would be very SOA friendly?

The possibilities are endless. May the rethinking begin.