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former_member181875
Contributor
1,550
Ouch!!! - I've been biffed by richard.hirsch, susan.keohan and jocelyn.dart.

Introduction


Like Dick, I saw value in working a 80% week to spend one day a week with my newborn (quite some years back) son. I can't say it helped my career, and my son wouldn't necessarily agree that the extra discipline and vitamins helped his development, but I'm very grateful to SAP for enabling this.

Workflow is my speciality. I even set up my own workflow knowledge site (before SCN or SDN existed) www.workflowing.com, which is still out there, looking like a dying galaxy in the distant World Wide Web 13 TCIP-years away



Fun facts about me/my country


Like Dick, I uprooted myself from my country of birth (UK->Germany). I just wanted to try another culture (where pubs don’t close at 10:30pm and where cycle paths are taken seriously) and eventually ended up settling near Walldorf. The UK is still my number one holiday destination.



(Me, performing "jubilee waves" along the Cornish coast during the jubilee weekend)



Passion: Coaching the next generation. E.g. SAP NemoKids for the First Lego League:

The Questions



What is your favorite city and why?


Rome. Food and romance. Also because of the way historical structures like the Roman Forum or the Appian Way tangle their way into modern urban structures.

I read that 6% of humans who ever, ever, existed are alive today. That's staggering. In Rome you're confronted with an image of how the ancient civilizations metamorphosed into the bustling modern cultures on this planet today. Let's see if Woody Allen can do justice to this city to the same extent as Fellini.

What made you start actively participating in the community and why would you recommend to people to give it a try?


I like creating things, but I don’t have the patience to do everything perfectly. So I like to show how to do something well, and then see how others take this knowledge and do things even better, sometimes perfectly. That person’s new creation makes me tremendously proud.

SCN is a very forgiving community. Even if you publish a potentially embarrassing mistake someone will politely help you out. So you have nothing to lose by just diving in giving it a go.

If you were given by your work a full day every week to do whatever you feel like, what would it be?


Much as I hate to admit it, it would be developing software. Cloud-based Business Process Management software. Why? Because that’s the future.

My personal belief is that the world’s software vendors are still at least ten years away from significant steps forward in process automation that match the scale of changes made to graphics or gaming software development. We (the industry) are still only capable of modeling or automating the workflow equivalent of the Gulf Stream. But what about all the other currents? Currents that travel in depth as well as direction; eddy currents that oppose or amplify each other, thus changing dynamically over long timelines as one process influences another.

With Big Data (read HANA) that could change. There’s now the possibility to abandon the traditional pixel by pixel approach (as graphics software did twenty years earlier) and start applying different mathematical algorithms to achieve a BPM breakthrough.

What is your least favorite piece of technology today?




The smoke detector. It could be a lifesaver (I lost a college acquaintance at university through a smouldering mattress). But being woken at two o clock in the morning by the acoustic signal that warns you to replace the weak battery within 2-3 weeks is c-o-u-n-t-e-r----p-r-o-d-u-c-t-i-v-e.

Why does the alarm trigger at night not day?  It's inevitable because a battery is weakest when it is coolest. Sadly, manufacturers are forced to build this warning into the alarm to achieve certification.

Longing for a device that suppresses the warning until 9:00am, or until it is light, or uses an optical signal instead - saving even more lives.

#DecentSmokeDetector

Passing the Biff


Hoping that stefan.henke, sufw, philip.kisloff and anjan.paul will take up this challenge and include my last question.

Very first Next
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