New design for my blog

It was about time, time to do a bit of cleaning in the 'house'. While working on a new design for my blog, I had a few wishes:

• Rolling header with pictures
• Leaner design
• More space for blog posts

This is the result:

the new one

the old one

Thanks to Louis van de Wiele, who helped me out with some scripting and CSS stuff.

Hope you like it.

And a happy birthday it was ... #sitNL 5 year anniversary

Celebrating 5 years of sitNL

On Saturday November 23, it was time to celebrate our 5thanniversary. For the 5th time SAP NetWeaver and SAP TechEd enthusiasts gathered together to share knowledge at SAP Inside Track Netherlands, sitNL in short.

Or to look at it from another perspective, our little event is just the warm up for Haseenah’s delicious dinner party in the evening 

Our sitNL birthday cake

Some statistics

The Ciber office was crowded, 62 participants joined for our SAP TechEd XPerience.

Some participant statistics

• 52 from the Netherlands
• 5 from Belgium
• 4 from Germany
• 1 from Norway (Thanks for joining Njal ;-)
• 44 different companies
• 7 customer representatives
• 12 freelancers
• 14 from Ciber
• 3 from Accenture
• 3 from TCS
• 2 from Synerscope

Some other sitNL statistics

• 14 high quality sessions (agenda)
• 1 entertaining Pubquiz
• 1 live podcast recording by the Dutch BI Podcast members

Recap

Roel van den Berge already shared his personal sitnl experiences. In this blog I’ll try to recap the day in pictures, slides, replays and some words.

Welcome and opening Twan van den Broek Practical use of innovations, check out how Mr. Beanuses scissors, his credit card and his socks to create a lunch. Innovations without practical use or where the end user experience is not taken into account will have a hard time in maturing. Prezi
SAP HANA Cloud Platform Matthias Steiner Matthias prepared the keynote for Vishal at SAP TechEd in Bangalore  Try it yourself, experience the cloud athanatrial.ondemand.com. When asked about participating the opensap courses, the majority of the sitNL crowd raised their hands. And made Matthias happy of course. Slides

Tweet Analysis #sitNL 2013

Thanks to Martijn Linssen we are able to do a sitNL Tweet Analysis via TwUniverse. And for your convenience, Martijn uploaded a pdf file to our wiki page. 

First some numbers

648 tweets, starting at Nov 17 20:50:27 2013 and ending at Nov 25 08:44:22 2013 on: #sitnl. That is 3.60 per hour.

Top 10 Most Active Tweeters

1. @steinermatt (48 = 7%); 
2. @tbroek (48 = 7%)
3. @roelvdberge (46 = 7%)
4. @martijnlinssen (41 = 6%)
5. @fredverheul (39 = 6%)
6. @jpenninkhof (33 = 5%)
7. @qualiture (27 = 4%)
8. @h_neumann (24 = 4%)
9. @wolf_gregor (23 = 4%)
10. @yonex_nl (23 = 4%)

Top 10 Most Influential (based on getting RT-ed)

1. @roelvdberge (50 = 19%)
2. @tbroek (44 = 17%)
3. @steinermatt (31 = 12%)
4. @jpenninkhof (19 = 7%)
5. @konijnenburg (15 = 6%)
6. @qualiture (13 = 5%)
7. @cbasis (8 = 3%)
8. @tomvandoorslaer (8 = 3%)
9. @fredverheul(8 = 3%)
10. @martijnlinssen (7 = 3%)

User Centered Design & Delivery / mini workshop

At the Ciber Knowledge Carousel Louis van de Wiele and I had the opportunity to explain User Centered Design & Delivery to our attendees. We decided to focus on the design part and conducted a mini Design Thinking workshop. To participate actively in a workshop is a better experience than just sit back and hear what the presenters have to say. But with only 45 minutes for our session we had to push time boxing to the extreme ;-)

User Centered Design & Delivery Workshop from Twan van den Broek

Our challenge was to “Redesign the event experience”, how to improve the event experience for an attendee. (Hah, quite an interesting case, if I may say so, attendees of our event were able to suggest improvements that we can use for our event next year ;-)

After an explanation of the challenge we kicked of with the first step.

1. Context

A short interview, 2 minutes sharp, to gather personal experiences on attending events.

• When was the last time you visited an event
• What did you like
• What didn’t you like
• Why did you attend

Agenda #sitNL - SAP Inside Track Netherlands November 23rd

Counting down, only a few days to go before sitnl kicks off. I think we have a very interesting line up at our fifth SAP Inside Track NL. Thanks to all the speakers who have submitted a session.

This year we have shortened the sessions a bit to make sure that there is enough time to get to know each other, talk to each other and enjoy. But with 8 tracks, there is still enough knowledge to absorb ;-) And we all know:

You can gather new knowledge by sharing yours.

Design Thinking with Field Service Engineers

How to bring relief to Field Service Engineers?

• How to create a user interface for Field Service Engineers who work in highly complex environments? 
• How to facilitate the engineers in their daily administration work?
• How to replace their +20 individual applications with one new working space?
• How to involve the engineers during the design?
• How to make sure that the final application is accepted and used?

The answer is of course: Design Thinking! 

Design Thinking with Field Service Engineers (SAP TechEd 2013) from Twan van den Broek

A story told by Julia Dorbic from D-Labs and me at SAP TechEd 2013.

Ciber Knowledge Carrousel 2013

Due to the success of the previous editions, Ciber is organizing the 6^th Ciber Knowledge Carrousel on November 14^th. This year we offer tracks for Management, Business and IT. The parallel sessions are gathered around topics like Cloud, Core, Methods, In Memory and Mobile.  You will hear about real life stories at customer situations and new developments and innovations within IT. 15 High quality sessions presented at an inspirational location, the Orangerie, in Den Bosch. The Orangerie, a former Catholic Church is situated in the center of Den Bosch, right in the middle of its beautiful shopping district and lovely canals.

You can register for free at the Ciber site or check out the agenda first.

You can find me talking about:

• SAP TechEd recap, together with Sven van Leuken, we will talk you through the highlights from last weeks SAP TechEd on Mobile, Cloud, In Memory and User Experience.
• User Centered Design and Delivery, together with Louis van de Wiele, we will explain Ciber’s methodology on User Centered Design and Delivery. Prevent building applications that will not be accepted or used. With a small Design Thinking workshop you will experience the power of co-creation and co-innovation.

Hope to see you November 14.

SAP TechEd 2013, the best and strangest experience ever

SAP TechEd 2013 - The best but also the strangest SAP TechEd ever

Together with 10 colleagues I visited SAP TechEd in November 2013.



Tim Burchartz - Jaap van de Mheen - Frank Hammen - Michael Hardenbol - Steven Spronk
Twan van den Broek - Roel van den Berge - Ted Castelijns - Maarten Kreijveld

(Missing on the pic: Leo van Hengel and Wim Snoep, who attended one day due to busy customer schedule)

Best

Team CloudSitter won the SAP InnoJam on Monday with an app that monitors new born baby’s on their wellbeing. Premature babies have an higher risk on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, that’s why we came up with a sensor that tracks heartbeat, temperature and breathing. Information is stored in a central database in which thresholds can be validated. If there is reason to warn, the mobile app sends an alarm and changes color. Time to check upon your child.


Matt presenting at InnoJam.

Winning InnoJam meant that we could also participate in DemoJam, the ultimate stage for an SAP NetWeaver professional. And guess what - we won!! Something new to SAP events as never before a team was able to win both InnoJam and DemoJam.


Matt again, this time on DemoJam stage together with Andreas Profitlich.




So how to top that? No idea, this makes it best SAP TechEd experience ever.

Strangest

While normally I attend SAP TechEd to gather as much as possible new information and hands-on experience, this year I got hooked up into several other kind of activities.


Final preparations for DemoJam on Tuesday.


An interview on Wednesday about me attending SAP TechEd.

Getting some makeup, answering questions twice or three times, some shots at showfloor, some shots in the center of Amsterdam, ... and after a few hours hard work - a real movie with me ;-)



Interview on Wednesday of Dutch SAP Mentors by @Amsterdamsel


Wrap up interview with Roel van den Berge and me on Friday by Chip Rodgers


Moderator at Marilyn Pratt's FailFaire event on Thursday evening. (Picture by Gregor Wolf)


Winning InnoJam and later DemoJam, being interviewed - it was a surreal experience and by that the strangest SAP TechEd ever.


More pictures

• SAP InnoJam pictures by me 
• SAP TechEd pictures by me
• Official SAP TechEd event pictures

SAP TechEd episode 2013

Here we go again, this week I will visit my 11th (!) SAP TechEd so far and for sure I haven’t had enough of it ;-)

Focus of my visit to SAP TechEd has changed over the years. In the early years I filled my agenda with at much hands on sessions as possible. Lots of ABAP, some MiniApps (early mobile aspirations), SOA and later BPM. But somewhere from 2009 on it has changed to meet as much peers as possible. Sure, hands on sessions are still really valuable during the event, but meeting and discussing with experts and peers to build your network comes in handy throughout the whole year.

Next to that I also like to bring something to SAP TechEd. I’ve done some talks on applying scrum to the SAP world, participated in BPM hands on sessions and as an ultimate achievement: reached SAP DemoJam stage in 2012, together with colleague Leo van Hengel.

Photo courtesy SAP TechEd 2012

If you want to meet up with me this year, you can find me:

Sunday

SAP InnoJam - Design Thinking coach

Wednesday

MOB121 - Together with Jon Dorst from Eneco we will talk about the implementation of SAP Work Manager at Eneco

EXP10205 - Design Thinking for Field Service Engineers, how do you design a user interface for a complex process. If we have enough time I will also tell you a fairy tale about the SAP Mobile Platform

Thursday

EXP10204 - Together with Julia Dorbic from D-Labs we will talk about applying Design Thinking to the real life world of Field Service Engineers

POP160 - Assisting a BPM hands on workshop, covering BPM, BRM and an SAPUI5 user interface.

I wish you all a very fruitful SAP TechEd in Amsterdam!