The Second Question


As many of you have pointed out in private and in public – I have not blogged much since I have joined SAP . Trust me it was not intentional – just that other things like kitchen remodeling , getting used to my new job etc took all my bandwidth. But now that remodeling project is complete , I can get back to more blogging etc .

Any way – my first assignment at SAP is to work with our customers and partners to make sure they realize the value of BW on Hana . Since the day I joined SAP – I have been talking to customers about this, and something interesting became clear to me. So I thought it might be useful to summarize my customer and partner conversations in my blog so that we can have a more extensive conversation virtually .

When Suite runs on Hana , BW runs on Hana and assorted data marts run on Hana – what would be different for a business user ? In my opinion – after talking to several customers – it is the “ease of answering the second question” that is the most value adding scenario for a business user – especially the “business analyst” types.

Let me explain with an example that should resonate with many of the readers here

Analysts live in an ad-hoc world – their “real” work starts when an executive asks them a non routine question like “how many bottles of soda did we sell to top 5 distributors in Arizona last summer and how did we do against plan” . Question is simple enough – but there might not be an easy way to answer this .

Analysts will probably go to BW or CRM to find who their top 5 distributors are , how much was sold to them etc. and then they will probably log on elsewhere to find plan information . Finally, all of that gets dumped to an excel sheet , massaged with various vlookup functions etc and a prettied up table and graph will be presented to the executive . Most probably , one of the sources of information is yet another spreadsheet stored in a share point site.

Now, I have never met an executive who had asked all she wants to know in one question – and that includes me !

So as soon as the first answer comes in – the exec would ask her next question . “Hmm – that is interesting , how is that split across the various brands we sold them ?” .

The best analysts know this and will come with as much info that they can second guess. But that is a limited approach with most executives – invariably , more data dumps and analysis will be needed . And this takes time – hours at a minimum, days to weeks usually .

Now, what would change with Hana ?

For starters – a lot of data sitting in BW can be crunched and compared to spreadsheet data on the fly by the analyst without IT help using workspaces . This can be done without Hana too – if speed is not an issue and patience is over abundant .

BW sitting on Hana can be combined easily with other datamarts modeled directly on Hana via composite providers. So – adhoc queries spanning multiple sources become all the more easy . And of course the front end like BI 4.x Analysis makes this an excel friendly exercise .

Now when suite also works on Hana – and suite has the Hana Analytics Foundation under it – this becomes all the more easy . SHAF is nothing but Hana views that can also understand BW data . And of course it understands BI front end tools . So in effect – data sitting in suite, BW and other Hana datamarts are all available to users without a lot of manual work to make sense of it all .

Back to our analyst friend who got the second question – now he can quickly change the query to include more parameters and respond to the executive much faster than in the pre-Hana world . What is not to like ? 🙂

Of course , Hana does not replace the need to have a good solid BI discipline in place . The right way to look at this in my opinion is to think of how powerful is the scenario of having Hana and a good BI system together than just one or the other (or god forbid, neither).

It is also important to note that suite on hana does not eliminate the need for BW. Neither is it always a good idea to move everything in a BW system to a custom data warehouse even if it sits on Hana . If you are not convinced , try to implement a reporting scenario that is based on an ERP cost center hierarchy with time dependencies directly in Hana and also in BW on Hana . You can see why having these solutions to compliment each other is better than trying to force fit every requirement into one of them .

Now tell me – what is your “second question” I can help with 🙂

Leadership, Management and Gandhi


mahatma-gandhi

Right from my first day at Business School, I have been conditioned to believe that I should not ever aim to be a manager – I should aim to be a leader, an entrepreneur, anything but a manager. What my professors preached to me was reinforced by my bosses at work, and the books I read. And I have faithfully tried to pass along this message to the people who came after me. I have a feeling that most of you – if not all – have a similar story to tell. As I think about it – it is actually hard to draw a clear line between across leadership and management. So take what follows with a pound of salt – not just the proverbial grain.

Any way, in December I resigned from IBM, and took a break before joining SAP. In that break, I watched several movies – one of which was “Gandhi” . When that movie originally came out, I was in primary school I think. And I have watched it at least 50 times. But I have not seen it since I started working. And this time it shook my belief systems quite a bit. Although it was not a planned activity, I also had read a lot about India’s independence movement before I watched the movie. By the time my vacation neared its end, I was firmaly convinced that it is way better to be a leader AND manager, as opposed to just being a leader alone.

When it comes to leadership, Gandhi played in a league that many of us could not even dream about. He influenced and unified a diverse set of millions of people with no formal authority to win India’s independence. And he succeeded and influenced many other leaders – like MLK, Mandela et al. Formidable to say the least. If anything, Gandhi did not take a liking to “management” as we know it, and it did yield exceptional results. India did get rid of British rule, and on friendly terms with Britain.

However, the lack of respect for management did come at a significant price. He definitely had his favorites – like Nehru. Gandhi went out of his way to make sure that Nehru was seen as the foremost leader even when others had better support from the electorate. Subash Chandra Bose walked away from the post of President of Congress – which he won fair and square – because Gandhi wanted Pattabhi Seetaramaiah to be president. Later, Sardar Patel stood down and let Nehru have the Congress President’s job, and the Prime Ministership because Gandhi wanted it that way. This was the whole root cause of Nehru dynasty ruling over India even today.

There was a short term price too – that was significant. Gandhi did not prepare the country for partition and independence. This resulted in widespread loss of life and property. It is not that Gandhi did not know for a while that Jinnah was serious about siding with British for an independent Pakistan. But he let it linger till the last minute. But his inspirational style leadership did not manage to prevent partition. Eventually – it was Gandhi’s leadership ( including his threat to the country that he will fast to death ) and Patel’s managerial abilities that stopped the violence post independence.

Nehru was probably a mix of a manager and a leader – but probably could not find a successful balance between the two. Patel found a better balance than Nehru in my opinion. Patel used his managerial abilities to integrate the various states into one India – except for Jammu and Kashmir, and he could not do that because of Nehru’s inability to decide what is good for the country.

Of course there is a lot more that can be said on leadership vs management in the context of Indian independence movement. I have a few take aways from the movie and the history lessons, to apply to my life in corporate world.

1. Leadership is required to set direction : Gandhi did not start the independence movement. Congress Party was already founded before he even came back to India. But till he came back, there was barely any direction or mass movement to gain independence. Nehru, Patel and others were all already active in the movement and were better managers than leaders. But their impact was felt mostly after Gandhi set the direction.

2. Management is a bigger weapon in crisis prevention : Amply proven by how Sardar Patel integrating the states quickly, and Nehru promoting the 5 year plans. Not everything went smoothly, but things got done – and clearly would not have happened with Gandhi’s type of leadership alone.

3. Disaster recovery needs leadership and management both : as proven clearly by Gandhi’s leadership and Nehru/Patel acting as solid administrators post partition when the country needed both. One or the other clearly would have been less effective.

4. For continuous improvement – leadership is needed to move to next level, and management is needed to keep things running till the new stuff takes hold and becomes the “new normal”.

So in short, if I aim for leadership alone and loathe management – I probably will just be the guy holding a hammer looking for nails everywhere I look. And things will take forever to accomplish. If I aim for management alone – best case, I will at best get to keep things running – maybe with some incremental improvements, but not an awful lot more. So clearly I need to aim for a good balance between leadership and management. But it is a hard balance to strike – so may be the solution is not to strike a balance in me, but rather try to strike a balance across a whole team. I need to think about that .

Well there is one more thing I am taking away – the need to take more vacations and watch more movies and read more movies 🙂

SAP Business Suite Runs On Hana – What Does That Mean For The Ecosystem?


Today, SAP announced that suite will now run on Hana. It was my first event as an SAP employee and it was fun. I even joined Vishal on a blogger meeting 🙂 . I just wanted to post some thoughts on what it means to SAP ecosystem to have business suite on Hana. It is not an SAP official position on the topic – just my personal opinion alone.

So what does this announcement mean to Customers?

It gives customers more choice now – technically and functionally. Technically – they now have an additional data base option, lower their TCO over time , make use of Hana’s platform features, eliminate performance bottlenecks and so on. But that is only one aspect – the bigger impact in my opinion is the opportunity to rethink business models. For example – if MRP does not take several hours, and can be run whenever there is a need to run it – then there are some tactical and strategic advantages. Tactically, it saves people having spreadsheets to manage demand and supply – usually several versions – between MRP runs and reconciliation. Strategically, it means you only use up working capital you absolutely need to, and you can inform your supply chain about your intentions a lot sooner.

If my CIO friends are reading this – this is a good time to make sure you consider Hana in your roadmap discussions – not just for software, but for infrastructure, skills upgrade of your team and so on.

Of course both business and technology changes come with the need to manage change. And it often takes someone who looks across multiple customers to figure this out in a scalable way. That is where the consulting partners can potentially come in to augment what customers and SAP can do. The consulting and SI business will see some disruption as more and more SAP products move over to Hana. There will always be some SI work – but the more meaningful opportunities will be for these partners to work with customers on defining how to adapt business processes to make use of real time and massively parallel processing and predictive capabilities and so on.

And it will be a good time for SAP functional consultants to start thinking outside suite transactions and IMG. A good case in point is warranties, maintenance etc. Typically when a warranty solution is created – it is primarily reactive in nature. Like how does a customer enter warranty claims, the workflow and so on. What mostly gets overlooked is to check if there was a way to have known that a failure is about to happen, so that proactive measures can be taken to minimize impact or even avoid it. This means you should also consider the option of seeing if a system like hana can somehow be upstream to the business suite to pick up and interpret signals before data even came to business suite. I would urge my buddies who are SAP functional consultants to start getting up to speed on what is possible with Hana so that they can educate their clients on art of the possible, in their projects.

And the basis experts of the SAP world will have a fun time learning how to install, administer and maintain Hana based systems. If you need to brush up your linux skills – now would be a good time to do that. Get an AWS instance spun up, and try a few things on Hana. Same for my ABAP buddies. Get a SQL book and learn how to do set operations etc. There are plenty of hana tutorials out there now. Even an obsolete programmer like me was able to learn from them – so it should be very very easy for programmers to get a hang of hana. And definitely don’t overlook how to develop cool stuff on XS – you will thank me later. I will tell you that it will be a bit frustrating since good programming in hana is counter to good programming in ABAP in some cases. But you will get there quickly enough.

Having been a consultant all my life, I know Hana cannot be the answer to everything. But I do know that it will be a great option to solve enough problems in the business world that it will make a difference. And that is what I have bet my career on.