Who or what is a business user?

As a Managing Director, I am a heavy user of my PC. I guess I spend every day at least 2 hours behind a screen, working on systems. But I would not call myself a “real user” of an enterprise application. Most of my “system time” I am working actually on my mail. I do use our own SAP ERP, CRM, SRM, … systems, but only sporadic. And most of the time to approve, release or consult transactional objects. My personal system use is often linked to non-operational activities. The kind of activities that need information, analytics, communication and collaboration capabilities. Some would call me an information worker or a business user. As a business user, I need information for fact based decision making and communication. Enterprise Applications have for a long been focusing on transactional users or task workers only. People that enter sales orders or book invoices or release production orders are well served by Business Systems. The main focus of the software was and is on how to raise productivity, transparency and consistency for operational activities. But how about the non-operational activities? How about the information workers? This kind of employees only sporadic access enterprise applications. They mainly require information for doing their job; which is managing, decision making and steering their area of reponsability. And they want this intuitively, fast and anywhere. For a long time (too long?) SAP has under-served this user community. Only during the last years, SAP has been focusing to to answer the question: how can we increase the productivity of information workers? With the acquisition of Business Objects, SAP has clearly chosen to set new standards in this domain. Analytics is the name of the game : analytics embedded in transactional systems, analytics for informations users, analytics to bridge the gap between strategy and execution … With Business Objects Explorer, launched at the Sapphire in Orlando just a week ago, SAP want to take Enterprise Performance Management to a next level and make information available in a “google like search and click” approach. Everybody is used to serve the web looking for “the” piece of information that he/she requires. Just imagine that business users can serve the corporate information source to find the answer for his/her questions. This is closer to become a reality than it might sound. But there is more than analytics. The collaboration of SAP and Microsoft or IBM, the Duet and Alloy solutions, also fit into the program to address the needs of the business user, combining the familiar day-to-day working environment (mainly mail) with access to information and transactions in a convenient way. It is all about enabling users to become more efficient and gaining the necessary insight into the organization and analytics to become “better run”.