SAPPHIRENOW 2012 – Interview with John J Leffler of IBM


Added: 1/6/2015 John Passed away on 3rd January, 2015 in an unfortunate accident, while vacationing with his family. My tribute to him can be found here https://andvijaysays.com/2015/01/05/rest-in-peace-john-leffler/

Most of you know that I work at IBM. IBM is probably the biggest partner of SAP globally – on Hardware, Software and Services. I have spent a good part of my SAP consulting career in IBM Global Business Services, and I have several mentors who are IBM executives. I have looked up to them for many years, and have derived a lot of value from their insights. I was curious to see if these folks would be open to share their perspective with the larger ecosystem so that a few others can get the benefits that I got by listening to them analyze the SAP market, and explain their views on career growth. Of course there is an aspect of IBM getting some potential good press as a result, which I don’t deny for a second.

I reached out to one of my favorite leaders – John Leffler, to see if he has an interest in such an initiative. He agreed in a heartbeat, and we decided to shoot this while we were at SAPPHIRENOW 2012 in Orlando, FL. Kristina Ferrari , another IBMer and dear friend volunteered to shoot it with her flip cam.  It is an unedited version – and an amateur production 🙂

John Leffler is the Managing Partner for IBM’s North American SAP consulting  practice and takes care of our relationship with some of the top customers globally, and used to run the global practice till very recently. He has been in the SAP field longer than any one else I know, and has seen the SAP consulting market evolve from its first days. John grew his career from being a functional consultant, and then as Project manager and then a regional leader and about 12 years ago, he started leading the whole practice across the world.

John is big about differentiation in the market – and hence he readily throws all his weight behind the innovation agenda of our SAP practice. I can vouch first hand how much support he has given to the practitioners who explore innovative ideas in the realm of SAP solutions. John is a great supporter of co-innovation between SAP and IBM, and have actively sponsored several such initiatives in the past.

So without boring you any more with my commentary, here is the interview . Let me know what you think. If you have questions for John, let me know and I will try to find answer.

Here is a bonus video where John and I discuss how to develop an SAP consulting career in IBM. I originally shot this right after the video above for my colleagues in IBM’s SAP practice. But I thought there is enough material in this to pick the interest of folks outside IBM too.

I am planning to do a few more of these with IBM and SAP executives going forward, if I see an interest from you folks.

If it is not thanksgiving day, will you not say “thank you”?


Or conversely, if you say “thank you”, does it mean you are celebrating “thanks giving day” ?

I am jetlagged – and this is the thought that strangely came to mind today morning as I was on my 3rd cup of coffee. I attribute it to a bunch of emails I read yesterday night, and a few phone calls I attended today morning. You know who you are – and you are responsible for what follows in this rant – for good or bad.

Totally rhetorical question for most people – and I hope none of you who read this fall into the minority who will answer differently from the rest.  Yet, most of us to some degree are hung up on certain days to do certain things.

When I first moved to US for my job – my manager was a French guy. Few days before thanksgiving – someone asked him at lunch on what was his plan for thanksgiving. His reply was ” You know I am French, right? . We don’t need a specific day in the year to say thank you ! “.  He wasn’t joking – and the guy who asked the question really felt bad. Totally awkward for me sitting at the same table.

When I grew up in India, there was no such thing as celebrating father’s day, mother’s day, valentine’s day etc. We did have Christmas, Independence day etc.  Now – I see Indians celebrate valentine’s day et al the same as US and other countries. But not having grown up in a time when this was a big deal – I find it hard to feel anything special on these days. I call my parents every few days and meet them as often as I can, and hence have no reason to remember when Father’s day or Mother’s day is. However, my daughter who was born in US and goes to school in US is growing up believing it is a very special day – and of course I humor her and play along.  It is fascinating to say the least watching how 2 people of Indian origin – me and my kiddo – have such diversity of perspective.

There is an economic aspect of this that should not be lost on us. Companies that do their business based on sales of Greeting cards, chocolates and flowers probably make billions of dollars every time such a “day” is celebrated. And they do a good job with advertising – I have seen the impact it has on my own little daughter. These companies have successfully bred a sense of guilt in her that it will be terrible if she doesn’t buy a card or a chocolate for daddy and mommy on these days.  I am ok with it as long as she does not get an idea that the only day she needs to think of daddy and mommy are on father’s day and mother’s day.

On the work front – the thing that gets my goat in a similar manner is the abuse of the word “innovation” . There is no limit to what companies do to proclaim to the world that they are innovative.

Why is it difficult to admit that there are only so many original ideas in the world, and that if every one had such ideas – no idea will have a marginal utility bigger than others to qualify as innovation? By all means try to find the next big idea – please don’t stop doing so, but please please try to resist the temptation to shout out at every step of the way that “we are innovating”.  No – you are just working, whether it is an innovation or not will be known after the fact when customers get to judge it.

I have long held the view that the only folks qualified to judge innovation are customers – not vendors, and not analysts, and not book authors, and not me. It is not innovative if customers don’t attest it as such.  And hence I would love to live in a world where vendors do not talk about innovation happening in labs, and where bloggers and authors and analysts don’t get all high and mighty and start judging what is innovative and what is not.

I also believe strongly that innovation should not be confused with being new. It is not as if innovation started 2 years ago – and hence any thing old is not innovative. To my mind – if something has withstood time, it is extremely innovative.  I think it is beyond stupid when people say things like “how much of this company’s revenue is coming from new products”. What world do these people live in?  If innovation needed to be new – you would have thought that the poster children of innovation such as Google would have moved past income from search and adwords, Apple from ipods and Macs, and so on. Also, who are we to say if innovation is earth shattering or incremental?  If I did not open up games that have higher resolution – I would not be able to differentiate easily between last 2 versions of iPad. Does that mean the latest iPad version is not an innovation? No – it is innovative, since customers bought plenty of it.

One last rant on innovation before I brew another kettle of coffee.  What is the deal with “innovation days” ? So Google (and 3M before them) had an idea that one day a week should be devoted to pet projects. Good for them – does that mean everyone else who tried got a big benefit? did aping that make any one else a lot more  innovative? How did it work for Google itself – did it open up avenues whereby other streams of revenue matched or came close to the money that the search business brings home?  And what has company shouted from roof tops that “we are doing ( choose one or more from <open, closed, terrific,…>) innovation ”  and then followed up with something customers agreed was innovative?  The ones we celebrate as innovative – at least as much as my jet lagged memory can be jogged – have never announced before hand that they are innovating.

And that is it – I need that 4th cuppa NOW !  After that I need to work on the innovation agenda for my new role 🙂

Cloud And Mobility Market In India – See It To Believe It !


As I am finishing up my visit to India, I cannot help but wonder why I chose to make a living in USA, and not here. As I stepped out the air conditioned room I was sitting in at my parents’ apartment to drive to a restaurant with my dad for lunch today afternoon – the answer became clear. It is the heat and  humidity, the pollution, lack of effective governance, inability of people to stand in a line, the terrible traffic and the lack of large number of dog shows.  It definitely is not about money any more – wherever I turn, I can see an opportunity to make a successful for-profit business.

Since I had some time on my hand, I walked around trying to gather some primary intelligence on what the potential opportunities are in India.

Any one who has been to India knows that Indians have a craze for mobile phones. I always thought that bandwidth is a big problem here.Guess I was wrong. I did not have a single dropped call here. I am typing this on a tablet using Wifi at my parents’ house in Trivandrum, while also streaming CNN on my PC . Speed is not the same as what I get in USA, but not bad at all.

My dad, who can use a computer – but usually stays away from it, has two. My mom has one. The guy who sells vegetables in the local market has three, the butcher has a belt around his waist that holds 4, plus the one he has connected to his ear via a blue tooth, the 9 year old daughter of our neighbor here has an iPhone and so on.  I am also (proudly?) convinced that my dad and his uncle can out-SMS most kids I know in USA.  All business is done on mobile – usually via SMS. My mom can book a table for dinner, call a cab, ask for home delivery, get a prescription refill –  all by SMS – and apparently so can everyone else I have met here in these last couple of weeks.

So I decided to ask a few of these vendors on how they manage this traffic of incoming calls and text messages. Apparently they are at their wit’s end on managing this. Most small vendors have paid assistants who answer the calls and text messages, and keep a tab on a piece of paper or an old diary and send back confirmation. The more advanced ones use a excel sheet.

In a given day, they lose about 20% of their orders (some as high as 50% on high volume days) due to clerical errors.  I know many of these people from the time I was a toddler, since I grew up here. And they know I do some work with computers.  Several of them asked me if I can write them something on a computer to help them do their business better. They did not press this issue since they all had a line of customers waiting behind me in most cases to do actual business. The only mobility scenario I found here that has a good degree of sophistication is mobile banking, and it is widely used.

This led me to the issue of how pervasive are computers and internet connections in this segment.  Although everyone in this “Very Small Business” category had one or more mobile phones – usually a smart phone, none of them had a computer at work.  Most of them said they have one at home that their kids use, and that they pay for broadband access. Sure enough they have no idea what their kids do with their PCs. So whatever solution these folks need – has to be done via a mobile device.

I would have died of shock if I found an Apple Store in Trivandrum – and I did not. However, I had a near shock experience when I found that there is a Samsung showroom exclusively for smartphones and tablets. I swung by the store, and it is pretty big and nice and carries everything that one would expect in similar stores in other countries.

Next up in my agenda was to move up the chain and talk to people who run bigger businesses – like builders, architects, automobile workshops, car dealerships , law firms etc. Again, most of them are folks I know from before, and/or known to my parents.

Their big problem is managing their financials, payroll and compliance without extreme trouble. On the high end, they have software – either commercially purchased, or built in-house.  They have in-house IT staff and an army of accountants to keep the business running and compliant. In the lower end – they have all bought a computer or two, and some accounting software, and an internet connection. But no one seems to use it well. Many of the smaller shops have not switched on the computer in years.

There is no POS integration to begin with, even in some of the bigger shops. And even in shops that say they use computers well – I could see the industrial strength printer working non-stop generating the big multi-column reports. None of the business owners knew with any accuracy on their working capital, or gross profit. Apparently they need to talk to their auditor’s staff periodically to see how the business is doing financially.  There is zero workflow that is automated. Workflow essentially is a bunch of people running around with print outs of emails, or shouting over cubicles.

There is apparently an e-governance initiative under way in the government. They are now keeping electronic copies of everything – but of course, they also print everything in triplicate and file the hardcopies just in case a disaster happens. It does not help that the laws have not kept up with computer advances – so some of this hard copy fascination is just a response to legal requirements.  Traffic tickets etc are still dispensed by hand, and I have not seen any officer on the street using a smart phone or something for work. Everyone has a personal phone – usually very advanced ones. May be government can save some money by encouraging BYOD here.

I had to renew my passport here, and walked into the local office. Before I left USA, I had uploaded all the required documents into their site.  The passport services is at least partially outsourced here. The lady from TCS who handled my case at first window took one look at her screen and said – ” Your file is no good. You have left many of the mandatory fields empty” . I honestly did not know what to say. I decided against asking her why her system saved my application if it had missing mandatory fields . Next up, she said “I see you have uploaded all the documents. Unfortunately, I cannot download any of them in our system. So you can just give me photocopies”. I felt smug that I had already anticipated this will happen. Eventually she handed me off from Window A to Window B. I physically took some paper work from A to B. Person at B told me I also needed to include my marriage certificate. I had it handy, but he would not take it – I have to restart at A . Ok, so I did that. Eventually I was handed over to B and then C . At C, the lady double checked everything that B did, and that was it – in 3 hrs, I was out of there.  I would love to meet the person or team that designed the process and the wonderful software, and get a copy of my paperwork autographed.

The last area I tried to understand was how sales force of these companies use IT, if at all. Field sales for these medium size companies have company issued phones, and in some cases smart phones. Some of them also have laptops. They file field reports either on paper, or in a word document that is emailed. Some one in back office then files it in appropriate folders etc. For things like price and availability , they use the company phone to check with their friends or with back office. T&E is all done with paper, and needs manual signatures for approvals.

In each of the above cases, there are existing solutions – usually in cloud as SaaS, and most of them have a mobile interface of some sort. Yet, I saw very little awareness – instead the smart people who run these businesses have just adapted their business model to overcome the lack of technical advances. I asked them if this was due to a limitation on their part to spend money. The answer was eye opening. Every one including the butcher with the belt full of mobile phones to the builder of big high rises is willing to spend money on getting a solution that will help their business. They are only too aware of what they are losing out.

I asked them if the local IT companies have ever approached them offering solutions. Overwhelmingly, the answer has been an emphatic NO.  Additionally, the perception I got was that the local companies – even smaller ones –  only care about winning work from abroad and executing in India, as opposed to winning work locally. I don’t know if this is because of their cost structures or for some other reason.

At least with these people I spoke with – there is some awareness of social media  but near zero awareness for social business. Some of them use Facebook to keep in touch with their children who live abroad. Only one person knew what twitter was. On the bright side, I showed some of them what to do with FB and twitter and some of these folks seemed to like it.

Finally, I did a gut check with some colleagues in Bangalore, and some old classmates from Trivandrum – apparently the IT companies in India do play heavily in domestic market, but focus almost solely on large enterprises in India.  From a couple of weeks of asking around, I am firmly convinced that cloud and mobility are both potentially big plays in India for the very small to medium sized firms.  At a minimum, I would urge my friends at software vendors all over the world to check out the market first hand . Seeing is believing.

Slightly off topic – I had to spend some time at a hospital here in Trivandrum this week, where my aunt was admitted. Absolutely the best doctors were in charge of the treatment for sure – and the staff followed absolutely the worst process ever engineered. Plenty of administrative “paper based” mistakes were made in the few hours I was there, and I almost had to pinch myself to check if I was in 2012 or 1712. This does not really need mobility or cloud to solve – just good old client server will do. Or even a better paper based approach – I just cannot imagine life and death issues being handled through the current pathetic process.