SAP CIO Oliver Bussman stopped by The Cube (see full video below) at SAP SAPphire 2012 this week to talk about our own John Furrier and David Vellante about his life as a social media maven and how his internal IT staff becomes the taste-tester when it comes time for SAP to eat its own dog food.

The conversation kicked off with a discussion of how Bussmann was recently named the most socially-active CIO out there, ahead of his counterparts at Google and IBM. Basically, Bussmann says that it’s just become a natural part of his day – SAP partners, peers, customers, analysts, press, all of them have their own social media presences, and it’s simply a better way to stay in touch.

The fact that he finds his own productivity and efficiency increase due to the collaborative aspects of social media makes him a living, breathing proof of social’s place in the enterprise, he says. Later, the conversation would turn to the value of social media to SAP at large, with Bussmann affirming the value of the feedback that user communities can bring to the table in real time.

In short, social media needs to part of any modern executive’s workflow, or else risk losing critical insight. In fact, there’s a behavior shift coming, and executives are going to expect to be kept up-to-date with social media and the associated analytics all the time, in the same way that most decision-makers are glued to their e-mail. To that end, real-time analytics need to be made easy to consume and mobile.

Another growth area for SAP is in mobile device management, Bussmann says. CIOs still have a pressing need for solutions to help bring Apple iPads and iPhones online and ready for business. Mobile device management (MDM) is a growing field, and bring-your-own-device isn’t going away in light of rising smartphone and tablet sales. Bussmann highly recommended that CIOs make the investment in mobile.

Mobile apps, Bussmann notes, are a country-specific, product-specific and user-specific issue. There are questions of infrastructure (online/offline functionalities), of device type (smartphones vs. old-school phones), and generally, customer needs and behaviors.

On a topic change, Bussmann says that big data is a big value driver in today’s IT landscape. When it comes to social, mobile, analytics, the cloud and everything else that’s been on SAP’s agenda at SAPphire this week, he has 5 percent of his budget earmarked for having it deployed on internal infrastructure. Internally, SAP is using big data to analyze the transactions of 4,000 sales reps, judging whether a deal is likely to go through based on mountains of past experiences recorded in a database and make intelligent choices around prioritization.

For the second half of 2012, Bussmann says his priority is on leveraging more of this cloud and big data technologies for SAP’s internal IT usage. That goes especially for ERP deployed on the SAP HANA in-memory database, a spotlighted product at SAP SAPhire this year. And, as employees come in to SAP with their own experiences, they’re going to be expecting a certain level of mobile readiness, and it’s up to Bussmann to get SAP there.

And, on a final note, Bussmann noted that SAP has already applied gamification principles to its SAP Mentor program, and that yes, that’s a trend that’s only going to keep growing.

For the full interview with Bussmann, check out the video below.

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