Day 40 - SAP

Today as many of my friends and family are aware is my birthday. So I spent sometime responding to all my birthday wishes, which was great. To Celebrate I invited my host Carla to lunch in town. 

Schnitzel with fries and gravy

Returned home to get changed and ready for the visit to SAP.

SAP Head Office

Well today I got to visit SAP. I meet with Oliver Pink who is the project manager for the internal SAP knowledge management system. He has been working with SAP for a number of years, finishing off an apprenticeship. Oliver has been working in the area involved in designing and development of a central knowledge management portal for SAP. 

I signed in at the door and Oliver came down to meet me. We then proceeded to the cafeteria area near his office. At which time I then put the recorder on and then we proceeded to discuss the work that he has been involved with at SAP. We touched on a number of point with respect to Usability and UX (User Experience) and the ideas that SAP are working with. All of their applications and development are controlled with the use of a Style Guide. This guide is specific to each of their major application streams. 

I discussed a number of other areas but Oliver's experience and background was defined to the portal area that he is working on. After finishing our discussions he is then going to try and line me up with a number of others of his associates to see if they had any availability in the next two days. I await to hear back from him to see who I can get to see. In some ways a little disappointing considering I spoke with quite a number of the SAP people in Australia and the CIO. I guess I just did not explain myself to well that I was interested in finding out how SAP was using UX and usability in the way it addressed its application development. 

I had written quite a bit explaining what it was I was hoping to achieve but it must have got lost in the translation. I must say though the time I spent with SAP in San Francisco was very good and I got a lot of helpful and interesting information from Sabine Kabel-Eckes the Director of SAP User Experience in the States. Hopefully I can get to learn more in the next two days from others at SAP.

Later in the evening I headed into town to have a look in Heidelberg and take the train to the top. It was one of those very steep rail tracks. 

Cart coming up on the opposite end of the cable

After returning to the level of the castle I then went around the castle that I photography the other day.

On the way back I past a number of houses which look quite stunning.

Tomorrow I have another interview lined up at SAP with one of their Software Architects.


Signing off 11:20pm