SAP InnoJam 2012 ‘Design Thinking’

Aart Troost, 12 September 2012

This year was going to be the first time that I would attend the SAP InnoJam. Until now I only knew of the concept from the media and of the stories from colleagues, but this year I was going to experience how it really feels to meet fellow developers, SAP Mentors, SAP InnoJam Gurus and code, code, code till really late at night.

The fun started the evening before while packing my bag, what do you need for 36 hours of presentations and coding? I really had no idea so I decided to ask my colleagues for help on Yammer.

Acorel Yammer

Wilco told me that I wouldn’t need a matrass because the sofas on the first floor are ideal for taking a nap. So I packed some clothing, a sleeping bag, my toothbrush, my iPod with a couple of new mixes and of course my computer and I was ready to go.

The next morning I arrived at 8 o’clock at the SAP office in Den Bosch and I checked in at the front desk and got my badge and program for the day.

The badge said that I already was a SAP InnoJam’er!!

At 9 o’clock the event started with a keynote from Rui Nogueira (SAP InnoJam) and Rob van der Marck (Managing director at VNSG ‘Dutch Society of SAP Users’).

After that we had an introduction on the Design Thinking process presented by Hester Hilbrecht (SAP InnoJam). She also introduced the rest of the program for the day. We were going to build a solution for one of the next three business cases. The topics of these cases is ‘Healthcare’.

How can we help people with “high risk” heart failure to prevent a serious condition (stroke) by using remote monitoring?
How can we ensure to prevent healthy people from getting heart diseases, by educating them?
How can the IT department of Haga Hospital help to reduce the high number of no shows at their health clinic?

I already made some new friends and our group had to develop a solution for case number 3. The next 1.5 hours we interviewed several people related to the healthcare topic. Amongst them were a nurse, a patient, a financial manager of a heart clinic, an application manager of a heart clinic, a nurse practitioner and someone from a health insurance company.
One of the first stages of the Design Thinking process is to really get to know the people who you are developing your solution for. It’s really easy to think that you already know what those people need, but it is obviously better to hear from them what they need and what their experiences are.
By now we were ready to come up with two characters who would be the persons for who we would develop a solution.

We created Janny (54 of was it 51?), a hard working mother of three. She works as a secretary at the health clinic and is responsible for the agenda of several doctors. She is really punctual and really wants patients to show up. The second character is Fons a single young male. Has a demanding job and has a very busy social life.
After the interviews and research stage, we had some really serious brainstorming to do and we started prototyping.
We decided to describe a typical day in the lives of Janny and Fons.

Storyboard

After prototyping we had 3 minutes to present our solution to the rest of the InnoJam’ers. This is what we presented:

After presentations and before dinner the SAP InnoJam Gurus presented the techniques to use.

SAP NetWeaver Cloud: Presented by Matthias Steiner (SAP)
HANA: Onno Bagijn (SAP), Niels van Noort (SAP)
Sybase Unwired Platform: Martijn Tielen, Giel Janssen Lok (SAP)
SAP UI5: Martijn Tielen (SAP)

I was really interested in SAP NetWeaver Cloud and SAP UI5, so I installed Eclipse to get started with SAP NetWeaver Cloud. If you want to get hands on yourself, have a look at http://developers.sap.com

After dinner the time had finally arrived to do some serious coding and getting familiar with some new techniques. We decided that two of us would create some mockups and the others would concentrate on the usable techniques.

The initial idea was to develop a Calendar tool for Janny and an app for Fons. So I started to Photoshop some screens of a possible reminder app for Fons.

App mockup

The idea is that Fons receives a reminder of his appointment, he then confirms, reschedules or cancels the appointment. The ‘Cancel’ possibility has intentionally been made smaller then the ‘Confirm’ or ‘Reschedule’ option, this because we want him to come to the hospital. If he wants to reschedule he will see the available slots and he choses a new day and time.

There was simply not enough time to get this application working so this idea ended at the mockup stage. So I decided to have a look at the SAP NetWeaver Cloud possibilities and started to develop a screen for Janny on which she could see the calendar of a certain doctor. After installing all the necessary software and SDK’s I made a little start with the calendar screen.

Meanwhile a lot of people went home and others stayed at the office to sleep. At 3 o’clock in the morning I was getting pretty tired and I headed upstairs to find a place for the night.

SAP Couch Surfing

Some of you might actually recognize the spot, the flash of my camera is visible in the rooftop windows of the SAP building.

At 7 o’clock a new day of coding started I managed to create a simple screen with a clickable calendar, once again the idea was to create a calendar with the appointments of the day. Some of the days should be red or orange indicating that there were appointments with patients that might not show up. Janny would click on this appointment and could decide to send an email, sms or indication by app.

SAP UI5 screen

In the meantime other team members managed to create an iPad app with data from HANA so we decided that we would use that to present our solution.

So this is what we presented as our solution:

After the presentations the jury took some time to decide who won the InnoJam 2012 NL. Unfortunately we ended as the runner up, actually not bad for my first InnoJam.

Tired but satisfied I shook hands with some SAP InnoJam Gurus and my team members and headed home…

I would like to thank:

The complete SAP InnoJam (Guru) team for their help and the fantastic experience
Hester Hilbrecht for explaining the Design Thinking concept
My team members of team ‘Show Up’ (Ralph Knoops, Fons van Nuland, Jasper Oudenaarden en Vincent Weiss)
Rui Nogueira for making the videos and for being the ‘Master of the Universe’

Hope to see you again next time at the SAP InnoJam!