| | may 20149CIOReviewEmbracing Technology to Drive Sports InnovationsOur collective knowledge and talent has changed the customers' perception of SAP by presenting us as a software company and a strategic partner focused on the growth of their company. We truly understand that we are designing for people, to bring human meaning to technology. Design Thinking enables a new way of problem solving and to improve business software design.We hold design thinking workshops to help sport teams envision how data can be consumed to make the best decisions and build new business strategies. When we bring the stakeholders together to discuss, analyze and understand their business challenges, we create winning teams with game-changing strategies. For instance, the SAP Scouting solution was co-designed with the San Francisco 49ers' in preparation for their 2013 NFL Draft. The 49ers' needed a solution that would help their executives and scouts identify and acquire talent, compare draftees in real time, and ultimately put the best players on the field. Through a series of design thinking sessions, SAP identified the San Francisco 49ers' need to reduce uncertainty and improve results in the drafting process. The customized solution structures, how the team evaluates players and how it stores, analyzes and provides real-time access to player data. The system uses the SAP HANA in-memory platform, which is able to analyze information faster than ever. Initiated at a design thinking workshop, the SAP Scouting continues to provide sports franchises with new tools to help them engage fans and improve on-field performance. This year, the SAP Scouting solution won the prestigious `2014 People's Choice Award' at the Interaction Design Association and now continues influencing the next generation UX through Fiori across all of our solutions.Sam Yen, Global Head of Design and User Experience at SAP, has helped drive design thinking methodology across the company. "We try to implement design thinking into our products as the first approach," says Sam. "One of our customers is a large Fortune 500 company. We invited the company's CEO and the leadership team to a design session to see how SAP software can benefit their business. They spent two days with us really understanding what this technology is and now if they had this technology how it would transform their business, how they would run their leadership meetings differently, how they would run our business processes differently. What worked really well for us is starting a more in-depth dialogue with our customers about how SAP can help them target their real needs and identify problems."We at SAP believe that design thinking can help solve problems and transform software development by bringing in new perspectives, creatively collaborating across different disciplines and focusing on people. We are constantly experimenting, making new discoveries, and changing our perspective, finding new connections and patterns and the resulting solutions help businesses run better than ever before.We often compare the software development process to a three-year-old child because three year olds are always asking "WHY?"Rodolpho Cardenuto
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