SIGDOC 2011 Diana Award

SAP was the 2011 recipient of the prestigious Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer Documentation (ACM SIGDOC) Diana Award. The Diana Award is named after Diana Patterson, past President of ACM SIGDOC. Every two years, the ACM SIGDOC gives the Diana Award to an organization, institution, or business that has made an outstanding life-time contribution to the field of communication design. Previous Diana Award winners include Adobe, IBM, RPI, W3C, Carnegie Mellon's Communication Design Center, Apple, MIT Press, and Xerox Parc.

The contributions that singled SAP out for this award are numerous. SAP's history of providing creative support for the users of their enterprise software applications includes, e.g., offering comprehensive training for its customers and improved user interfaces back in the 1980s, expanding and collaborating to meet the localized needs of different countries and corporations in the 1990s, taking the lead on e-business solutions and tailored company portals at the turn of the century and, up to the present, winning numerous awards as best place to work while developing 360 customer environments that continue to engage their growing customer base.

ACM SIGDOC was honored to have two representatives from SAP receive the Diana Award: Dr. Anja Kellermann and Dr. Sven Leukert. Anja Kellermann has a background in language training and linguistics and holds a PhD in sociolinguistics. She joined SAP in 1997 as a technical writer—documenting financial business applications, e.g., for tax declarations or credit management. She has since moved on to managing documentation projects and managing teams of technical writers and translators in various development areas at SAP. Today she is head of a central, so-called knowledge management team, which—together with the knowledge management teams in the development areas—drives innovation and standardization for SAP Knowledge Management as a whole, actively shaping SAP’s product documentation, its information design, as well as all related processes and necessary tools. Sven Leukert has been with SAP since 1998, after completing his PhD in mathematics at UNC Chapel Hill in North Carolina (USA). At SAP, he started out in a product management role, and has since moved into a management role, focusing on knowledge management, documentation and translation. He is currently responsible for the technical documentation in the Technology & Innovation Platform board area, leading teams around the globe. While delivering documentation and translation for products, his unit is also actively involved in projects to enhance the consumption of information, web 2.0 enabled content, and internal process and tool improvements.

Read more about ACM SIGDOC's Diana Award.