More than two thirds (67 percent) of Saudi business leaders agree that technology was ‘very important' to enabling a company's growth strategy, and 33 percent believe is ‘moderately important', according to a survey conducted at the SAP Value Academy in Riyadh last month. The SAP Value Academy was hosted in KSA to provide a forum for business leaders to learn about SAP's methodologies, tools, and benchmarks on topics such as high impact performance strategies, business case justification and benefits tracking. The knowledge base platform provides a disciplined approach for rapid adoption of value management best practices. “By hosting the SAP Value Academy in Saudi we are demonstrating the importance we place on making Saudi companies best run businesses, and how we are able to support them on this journey,” said Abdul-Raheem Bawazeer, managing director, SAP KSA. “Feedback from delegates following the event was very positive. Of those questioned, 73 percent of companies did not currently use formal management practices, however all those surveyed after having conducted the two-day course left with the intention of creating a value adoption plan to implement value management. In addition, all survey respondents felt that instilling Value Management as a key competence will support business and IT strategy alignment,” Bawazeer added. Top performing companies have developed value management practices that are worth study and emulation. SAP's interaction with these companies has resulted in an eight-year investment in developing tools, methodology and content for a robust value management framework. Organizations now have the chance to adopt, without the risk and time required re-inventing and refining, what others have already honed into a best practice. Of those surveyed at the Value Academy in Riyadh, 67 percent of respondents felt that it is ‘very important' to be able to compare the effectiveness of their company's business processes with industry peers, while 33 percent felt that this was moderately important. When questioned, the prime benefit of the SAP Value Academy for Saudi business leaders was to help define methodologies to support optimization of business process, this was followed by other benefits such as identifying industry specific best practice, and identifying and diagnosing process improvement opportunities. After 40 years of IT based initiatives, many organizations have seen two to three times better performance when they keep their eye on achieving the expected value throughout the cycle of project definition to delivery. A Value Management lifecycle has emerged as the enabling practice that provides these consistently high performance results. SAP's Value Management Academy provides the foundation for companies to begin the journey to adoption, by sharing these practices and successful adoption paths. Companies consistently delivering on their commitments have used a value lifecycle to plan, build, attain, sustain, and improve their performance. The lifecycle requires discovering value potential, translating strategy to execution, realizing the value and finally optimizing performance and investments SAP's mission is to share value management best practices to help every customer become a best-run business. Drawing from our strategic interactions with customers and partners, we have invested in the most comprehensive set of content, tools, methodology, and community resources to create a value management discipline in an organization. 2009 was a great year for SAP Value Academy worldwide with over 2,000 senior executives (mainly from IT, business or finance) coached from more than 1,000 customers.
