Bridgette Chambers became CEO of the Americas’ SAP Users’ Group (ASUG) in June of 2009, hired to lead a turnaround of an organization that was facing financial woes and, by her assessment, was “essentially ineffective” at delivering value to its members. She succeeded in that effort well enough to be named a 2011 Stevie Award finalist for the Turnaround Executive of the Year. At the same time, she has led the transformation of the group from a volunteer-led organization to a professionally managed technology association that is now the largest SAP users’ group in the world, with 100,000 individual members from over 3200 companies.

ERP Executive talked with Chambers about the turnaround, her vision for ASUG’s future, changes in the group’s events and new initiatives including ASUGnews.com and the forthcoming launch of a revamped ASUG.com Web site.

Q: What’s your assessment of what you’ve accomplished thus far at ASUG?

A: I’m really pleased both in terms of the accomplishments and the time horizon in which we completed them, especially wrapping up the turnaround and being able to move on to new achievements for our members. We originally projected it would take three years for the transformation to be complete, but we were able to retire the turnaround during our annual conference in May of this year, a year ahead of schedule. We re-engineered our internal processes so we are much more efficient, productive and able to work on a much lower cost base.

That’s good for everyone because we’re able to take the savings and reinvest them to deliver value for our members. This reinvestment gave us an opportunity to focus on preserving and extending value for SAP customers. We are, as we have been for the last decade, independent financially, and today we are operating at a high level of fitness for a not-for-profit. It’s really been a stellar two years.

Q: What were some of the highlights that showed you were finished with the turnaround?

A: We knew we needed to focus on the things that are really core to our organization, and creating value by delivering what the SAP customer needs to be innovative and effective. So we looked at our education, content development and delivery, influence and networking programs, the things we do very well, and what we could do to deliver those in a better way than ever before. That was key. We were able to do this because we did something new – we stopped and took time to really listen to SAP customers. We brought them into the fold, through town halls, focus group sessions, and volunteer advisory councils. We opened the doors to say ‘the community has to drive this’ so it’s a peer-led customer experience.

Other completed turnaround components included development of a completely new leadership team, which is doing a fantastic job, and establishment of better relationships with influencers and the media. Often times companies don’t communicate very well about what they’re trying to do or what they have accomplished. By improving relationships with the media, asking for constant feedback and creating transparency, we’ve made it possible for media to share our story more effectively with SAP customers so they can see what things mean.

Q: How would you describe ASUG’s overall vision?

A: The ASUG vision is about helping the SAP customer extend and preserve the investment they’ve made in SAP software and services. That vision resonates with customers who have invested a lot of capital in a world-class software program, which they need to be able to use to be innovative, and to solve problems in a way that increases their ROI. They need to better understand how to focus on on-demand, cloud, mobility and all the things that can really create and sustain competitive advantage.

Q: What’s the biggest challenge in realizing that vision?

A: Sometimes there are challenges with SAP itself, which is in the midst of change, trying to drive a new SAP.  When you’re such a large organization, I think it’s just hard to turn a battleship overnight.  So sometimes we’ve had to work with customer expectations and encourage them not to be disappointed because they’re not getting something tomorrow that they asked for today.

Q: ASUG helps influence the direction SAP takes, but how do you measure what you’ve accomplished?

A: Rather than using a single dashboard for total overall influence, it’s helpful to measure our results initiative by initiative and customer segment by customer segment. One example is the strategic special interest group we launched for the BusinessObjects group. In October of last year we created the first Influencer Summit for BusinessObjects customers. Rather than be presumptuous and identify influencers ourselves, we put together a nomination process and opened it up to BusinessObjects customers to nominate themselves or others. It was a standing room only event, which took place the day before the BusinessObjects Users Conference in Orlando. The Summit participants identified four key priority areas for SAP and delivered them to SAP within 24 hours. We’ve now been engaged in nearly a yearlong workflow to track milestones and achievements in those four areas, and we’ll announce findings in October in conjunction with this year’s Business Objects event.

Q: Speaking of events, we understand there are some changes for your fall events. What are you planning?

A: At TechEd in Las Vegas we’ll deliver over 100 hours of content to SAP customers. I’ll also be participating in a panel discussion at TechEd. And our fall ASUG SAP BusinessObjects Conference is now the largest BusinessObjects event in the world. SAP is providing a higher level of participation this year, with both Sanjay Poonen and Steve Lucas participating as keynote speakers. We’re also going to do the Influencer Summit again this year, which is an opportunity for customers using SAP BusinessObjects to decide priorities and what needs to happen in the year ahead, and how we’ll attain success against those priorities. SAP BusinessObjects users need to know they have a voice, that they’re a valuable part of the SAP ecosystem. The Influencer Summit is free. Anyone can come. We encourage customers to nominate themselves or someone else. If customers don’t take their seat at the table and let SAP know what is important to them, the community won’t drive the integration, the software will.

We are also running Fall Focus but we’re changing it. It’s called Community Focus this year. Our aim is to better serve the needs of customers who find it difficult to get travel approval, so we’re trying to regionalize the content, make it more theme-based, and bring more of it to them instead of asking them to come to us. It’s still a work in progress, but it’s taking shape.

Q: As you mentioned earlier, SAP is trying to re-invent itself with things like mobility and HANA. What is ASUG’s role in making sure the customer is somehow in the loop as these changes occur?

A: Influence is key. Before SAP moves into that brave new world they need input and validation from the customer to say that the direction makes sense. The big thing ASUG can provide is to help customers better understand how to navigate these changes and have a dialogue, not just within IT, but with the business leadership team. We have re-launched our CIO Council this year as an Executive Exchange, focusing on creating diversity among the executives who come together to talk about tough business decisions and issues. At our last meeting, we had several CIOs who came with their CFOs and COOs. That’s when they’re really making smart decisions, talking together about how to drive value for the entire company, not just from an IT perspective.

Q: You’ve also talked about the Integrated Enterprise. Can you explain what that is?

A: It’s a new program we rolled out this year. If you think about when customers first implemented SAP and all the questions and contingencies they had to plan for, all the collaboration that had to happen within an organization just to pull the trigger on tool selection and to make it through implementation, that was a lot of treacherous navigation. Now you’ve got this entire strategy from SAP that’s not just on-premise but on-demand, on device, in-memory. Customers are going to have to answer many of those same difficult questions. How do I take advantage of on-demand? What does it mean if I’m running my solutions in a cloud, or putting them on a mobile device? ASUG is building a knowledge base to help customers navigate through those questions and help them build a good set of metrics so they can truly drive operational excellence as they adopt new technologies. That’s what our Integrated Enterprise initiative is all about.

Q: You also recently launched ASUGnews.com. Can you tell us about the thinking behind that?

A: The idea behind it is to push down the walls and bring the information out from behind the firewall. That’s why ASUGnews.com is free, out there in the public domain. It creates a public space where we can give appropriate accolades to SAP but also hold them accountable when they need some critical feedback. A viral, visible marketplace is the best way to do that in today’s world. SAP has been very warm and receptive to it, and they’ve been very welcoming to our Editorial Directors, Tom [Wailgum] and Courtney [Bjorlin]. And we didn’t put a leash on those two. I promised Tom and Courtney I would take the hard phone calls if they came because we need to have real conversations, which we can’t do if we’re mainly concerned about minding the Ps and Qs of what keeps me out of trouble. They’ve already launched some new initiatives, such as ASUG News Radio and Community Corner, and I know they have some exciting new things planned for the early part of next year.

Q: What are your plans for the ASUG.com Web site?

A: We’re launching a new ASUG.com, which is really one of the biggest components of the turnaround. The current Web site doesn’t effectively serve our members’ purposes, and we’ve heard from them that it’s hard to find what they need on our site.  That’s a real problem because we are the place where hard answers to tough challenges are found. The vision for the new ASUG.com is Facebook meets Amazon. It will be a lot more intuitive for our members in terms of what they want, need and how they want to interact. It’ll feel like they’re on Facebook, but the back-end analytics will more intuitively match them with activities, people, content and so forth. We’re hoping this will cut down on how much email goes into their in-box while also creating a higher degree of awareness about what’s out there for them.

The other thing that’s going to be big about the new Web site is integration. We’re working on integration strategies with SCN right now, and we’re well on track with integration strategies with the BOB board. This should make it easier to find answers to questions when you’re on ASUG.com without having to post your question in three different places. That will be a big improvement for members when they’re trying to share or gather information.

This isn’t just a new skin or logo, this is an entirely new Web site. We will launch it before the end of the year, and then a year later, we’ll launch the next round of improvements. We’ll create a feedback process to get member input, and then the following year it’ll be the next round of improvements. This new Web site will be a real tangible example of ASUG delivering what our members need to get ahead.

Editor’s note: Paul Desmond contributed to this article.

ERP Executive is published by Panaya.