What does it take for execution success at SAP?


There is a prevailing thought in the ecosystem that SAP scores high on the strategy and vision, and where they need to focus is on execution. This came up in numerous conversations I had with Teched attendees this week. What is not clear is how exactly SAP is going to enhance execution capabilities. About 50% of all conversations I had in Las Vegas was on this topic.

For what it is worth, here are three thoughts on potential solutions, that were formed as a result of my conversations.

1. Cross-pollinate and learn from people who are good at it.

SAP has customers who make mission critical systems and on a deadline.  Why not request their help? Send developers and managers to watch how they work in their environment, and learn. SAP also has a bunch of SI partners, ISV partners etc who also have a lot of experience in delivery excellence.  Of course there are spectacular failures too from customers and partners – but it is a small percentage. It looks bad because headlines do not look as attractive for good news.  This is an easy route for SAP to enhance their execution capabilities.

Also, nothing stops SAP from hiring people from outside to inject new blood into the execution arm. Conversely I think others will benefit a great deal by getting some experts from SAP  into their teams.  The risk is that if not done properly – this could end up as unhealthy talent poaching which won’t help any one.

2. Include ecosystem in development and testing


Some variation of the APPLE model might work for SAP. SAP technologies have a big fan base. Current licensing models do not allow this really large pool of smart people to contribute to getting more and better SAP applications.  Sure there are legal and financial and infrastructure issues to be dealt with – but those can be dealt with if the leadership at SAP has the conviction and will to get it done.

SAP is quite good at working with customers on getting ideas for what products/features/functions etc are needed next. And they have a ramp up process which is quite good too.  However, there is a missed opportunity in using a vast ecosystem in testing.  And SDN is a great platform to get access to a large number of people who might be able to help with this, probably for free.  Why not allow software to be freely downloaded as trial versions? and if Cloud is the way SAP is going – why not host these and let SCN members play with it?

3. Industrialize innovation

Innovation should matter to the company in some measurable way.  Sure it is fun to do gamification innojams, and a couple of  apps in HANA a year. That will not add $$ to topline or bottom line. For that – innovation needs to be focused, and the process should be industrialized.

A good example is LOB on demand products.  Sales on demand, Career on demand etc are all very good – and have some of the best people at SAP doing their best to make it succeed. But they are too few to make it count. My gut feeling is that each takes couple of years to get to market, and then in another two years or so – they might make $100M or so. I could be wrong – and am glad to stand corrected. But at this scale – how much (and when) will it affect a $15 Billion company’s financials ?

Can SAP take the learning from first 2 or 3 OD apps, and get into  tens of applications being developed in parallel ? Can those be applied to HANA and Mobility applications too in some convergent fashion? I know SAP is big on agile and design thinking and other fancy ideas. Question is – do they scale to an extent that it moves the needle significantly for SAP?

As we recently joked towards the end of the HANA skills podcast with Jon Reed and Harald Reiter, we need some “action leaders”  to balance all the “gurus”, “thought leaders” and “visionaries”.

Some difficulties of making inclusion work


Yesterday, there was a terrific event at SAP Teched on inclusion, and design thinking. I was invited to be on the panel, but unfortunately could not make it in the last minute. This is just a short post to share my thoughts on that, since I could not discuss it live and learn from the panel and the audience.

 

When I started in SAP in the 90’s , Indians were a minority in this space.  I also remember the joy when I was included in teams where I felt excluded from. I have several accomplished women in my family (including my mother)  who did well in life, despite all the challenges life threw their way. As a result, inclusion naturally is very close to my heart. Even though I do believe inclusion is the right thing to do for many reasons, I see a few challenges to make it work effectively in an organization.

 

1. It is all about priorities

 

There is usually something else that is more important than inclusion for a given team. An example is the inclusion event yesterday – it could only be done with a small percentage of Teched attendees, due to budget, timelines etc.  Oranizations, teams and projects all have such constraints, and they might trump inclusion. This may be somewhat countered by mandatory inclusion by policy or law.  But laws might apply only to macro scenarios – a company might want something like number of women to increase by two times in next year. But does that mean HR, Finance and IT will all have twice as many women as they have today? Usually not. If not, then does it really help the whole organization despite championing inclusion?

 

2. Can you have ground rules? and who sets them?

 

Rules are the opposite of inclusion. Rules by definition, exist to exclude something or someone. But without rules – there will be chaos. So who decides which rules are inclusion friendly and which do not? Just by choosing someone to decide this – you are excluding some one else.

 

3. Inclusion for who?

 

Proponents of inclusion can have a bias depending on their own background. Women might think they are the ones that need to be included, racial or social or economic minorities might decide it is them that needs to be included and so on. It does not always end in a win-win situation for all parties.  And obviously, it is pretty darn hard to have every combination of inclusion work in a situation. So someone loses out and will feel they are not included.

 

4. What about the majority?

 

I have only seen opinion articles on inclusion – and not real conclusive research. I will continue to look for it. But there seems to be a thought out there that just by doing inclusion – will you decrease the effectiveness of a team?  Hypothetically – a team of people from one country that have worked together for a while, might not necessarily like a person from another country to be suddenly put in the team , even if he/she can do the job just as well. Over the long term, this will probably be ok – but there is a big risk that short time productivity will get a downward trend. How many managers and teams with short term deadlines will take this chance of decrease in productivity?

 

5. What is the link to design thinking?

 

Will inclusion help design thinking? I have some reservations. In general – if you have more ideas to choose from, you might get a better solution. But then again – what kind of inclusion will work?  Say you want a product that is designed primarily for men. Will a team of women be able to design it well? may be they could use a few men in the design process? That is inclusion – I agree. But inclusion can also be adding more Chinese and Japanese team members to the team. Would that inclusion make the design any better? I doubt it.  So it can be argued that inclusion as a general principle has limitations, and you need more filters. And once you filter like this – can it be called inclusion at all?

 

I am sure there are solutions to all of these – and I am speaking to a few people today to find out their perspective on this topic, and solutions they have seen to these problems.  It is way too important an issue to leave open for long.

SAP Teched 2011 – Monday and Tuesday. Hana, Hana and MORE HANA


Sunday was all about innojam. Theme : gamification (is that a word???) of the enterprise. And No – it was not based on “The games people play”. There were 13 teams…well, 12 serious teams and then us – the #PUKR team. PUKR stands for Puppies, Kittens, Unicorns and Rainbows.  To follow us https://www.facebook.com/pages/PuppiesUnicornsKittensandRainbows/123156007786007 . Our idea was to gamify the framework – so that you can gamify any business process. What can we say – we were ahead of our times, and the world did not see our vision. Especially the judges .

 

Jokes apart – it was a blast. 10 SAP mentors came together to put a solution together that had everything from a spec ( 1 page of backlog, half page datamodel), facebook page, twitter comments..and other assorted things like ECC, Webservices, HANA and BI 4.0.

 

The team that won did an awesome app on gamifying the expense reporting process.  And it had HANA and 2 IBMers and an SAP guy in the team. How much more do you need for sheer awesomeness? These guys went up to compete in demojam, but lost to an even more awesome team.

 

Monday night – we had the SAP Mentor reception. Which was the first time I got to eat something in 24 hours or so.  Aslann and Mark Finnern put up a great event for Mentors as always. And we had a surprise visitor – Vishal Sikka. He gave us some thoughts on the keynote that he was planning to deliver the next day. He also acknowledged that I had given him some grief on twitter for not responding to blog comments 🙂

 

I do think that it is a wasted opportunity for Vishal in particular and for SAP in general. SCN is the place where there is an even bigger brain trust than within the SAP labs.  Blog posts are just the start of a conversation. If you do not respond to the questions and observations made there – the blog just becomes something like a press release, but with a dab of lipstick. Of course Vishal is a busy guy – so maybe some one in his team can collect these questions, and Vishal can post a blog with replies.  Or find some other solution – but leaving these comments open does not seem like a good idea to me.  Knowing the guy – I will not be surprised to see him start responding to those questions.

 

Onwards to Monday – starting with the big keynote from Vishal Sikka. I was happy with the keynote.SAP did well.

 

1. SAP did the right thing by showcasing the two Asian customers who went live on HANA.  BRILLIANT !

2. Vishal reconfirmed the 9/16/11 date for GA for BI 4.0 .  Not sure why it could not have been 9/13 right at the Keynote, but I assume there is a good reason

3. HANA goes under BW as DB 53 days from now. This is probably the most exciting news for me personally.

4. Vishal clearly articulated his vision for ongoing intellectual renewal, and I got a feeling it resonated well with the crowd.

 

There were a few things about HANA that need attention too.

 

1.  It is all about HANA for sure. Mobility and cloud got some minor mentions, but guess what – customers have real budgets for those things. Mobility today is not a hard sell – I think SAP needs to focus messaging more on these two.

 

2. During the innojam – there were 4 tables created in HANA I think. Two were from my team and one from the team that won the innojam. Someone else must have created one more. We had Vitaliy, Harald and me in the room, and 3 SAP HANA experts. There was no visible traction for HANA there. People crowded around River and Gateway, but did not seem to want to deal with HANA.  When asked in keynote to raise hands for those planning to use HANA – a very small number of people obliged. I urge the HANA team at SAP to start actively engaging on SDN and other channels to get this fixed.

 

3. HANA needs serious datamodelling. Hand written DDL has limitations to scale. SAP needs to actively enhance the Sybase power designer (which I think is the name) and teach the ecosystem how to use it.

 

4.  Not sure if I heard this correctly, but the Asian customer who implemented HANA seemed to have done it all inhouse. If this is true, it is mighty impressive. But having worked with HANA myself, I cannot visualize how they managed to do this without active participation of SAP (maybe an SI too). I need to find out more.

 

5. How far does HANA scale ?  So far I have seen the several TB of data examples. But that is not big data in 2011. Can it work with Petabytes?

 

Just as I mentioned in my SAPPHIRE blog, I fail to understand why SAP is not promoting Gateway actively. I walked around asking people on their opinion on gateway. Very very few know what it is. It is a shame – and SAP should fix it.

 

I had an opportunity to catch up more with Vishal Sikka over lunch.  Many thanks to Mike Prosceno and Stacy Fish for making that happen.  That conversation was off the record, but I can say one thing for sure. SAP will make HANA work – and SAP could not have got a more passionate guy than Vishal to lead the charge. He knows the problems along the way – and he is fixing them as efficiently as he can.

 

After lunch meeting with Vishal, we had a blogger meeting with Nicholas Brown – from the mobility side of the house. He is a terrific guy – and an absolute straight shooter. It is a high potential area for SAP and I heard they have been doing well. Nic does not think HTML 5 is the magic bullet every one thinks it will be. He articulated well that there is a class of apps that will do well – like leave requests and time sheets, that BYOD folks will use en-masse. But there will always be a set of users who need native functionality of devices to do more complex things. Plus – the key question is “what is in it for the device makers?”.

 

There are 50 plus apps in various phases of development – so I believe SAP field sales now have enough ammunition to sell mobility well. They will not have to do a multitude of POCs to get customers to buy the SUP platform probably. But here is the deal – what is the model for the sale? Will you sell the 50K or 100K deals for one app development? or will you sell a whole mobility strategy and make a few millions of sale? I guess they will do both. But each requires a different partnership with ecosystem to make it work. For the large SIs – the strategy route might be more palatable, and for smaller boutiques – the one or two apps might be the better business. But in general – I think mobility has a bright future. I just hope SAP gives it sufficient attention, given the major focus on HANA.

 

One last point – to make mobility and HANA and cloud a success – SAP cannot do it alone. SAP probably cannot do it with existing partners alone either.  For the type of scale that will move SAP from a 15B company to something bigger and more profitable, and less reliant on maintenance $$ – they need some variation of the AAPL model to get a large pool of developers into the ecosystem.  This does not go well with current way of functioning SAP is used to. But all the leaders know it, and I hope they will figure out a solution. But a problem SAP can solve in near future is to make sure existing partners and customers have access to latest greatest documentation and training on all the new stuff they are coming up with. They cannot have education lag behind innovation by a big margin.

 

Demojam was the last event of the night.  I am quite amazed by the quality of the demos – very very cool. You should watch them all, and if possible talk to the finalists.  The winning demo was the best I have seen in a few years. Watch the videos and you will like it too.

 

On that note, I am off to the Wednesday sessions. See you tomorrow.