Scalability of UX activities in large enterprises: An experience report from SAP AG

Abstract

If a large company like SAP is selling business software, they face several challenges when you try to introduce new processes or change existing ones to increase the usability of your software. You need to get the right people with the right skills, you need to have the budget to run dedicated activities like user research or usability tests, and you need support from other internal organizations and management. The organizational part is relatively easy to address; a much harder challenge is to change people's mindset and thinking. It is not enough to introduce a new process and tell everyone to execute on that new process. You need a large commitment from the people executing the processes in order to change their behavior and the way they do things if such a large change is to happen. At SAP we are in the middle of such a change process and want to show you which challenges we have encountered and how we have dealt with these situations. We will also deep-dive into a concept which we call "User Experience Advocates (UxA)". © 2011 Springer-Verlag.