What would be cool to see in a modernized SAP Business Suite ?


I grew up as a consultant in SAP R/3 – programming and configuring several modules , across many continents and for a lot of customers . As I see the excitement build up for SAP Teched next week , I keep thinking of what more SAP can do to make the ERP system more modern .

I know a lot of people think moving ERP to SaaS is the answer . I don’t think that needs to be a priority for SAP at all . Even if SAP had a super duper SaaS ERP today , I don’t know a lot of SAP customers in America or Europe with “wall to wall” on premises ERP who will jump in with both feet . SaaS is a good long term option – but they have a lot of time to get there for core ERP . If at all SAP builds a grand new SaaS ERP – I think they are better off selling it to net new customers and not to instal base ECC customers .

Vertical apps – given SAP has 26 or so industries they have solutions for – seem like the most logical answer . But those are also incredibly hard to build . So I am looking for what horizontal functionality could help modernize the suite .

What was the original message of ERP? In the 90s – it was to give one view of your business . SAP ECC is an incredibly complex and comprehensive system – and it has all the data anyone would ever need . But – it doesn’t give “one view of business” . SAP can create a financial statement for a company code or a profit center in ECC , but that alone does not make “one view”. It is an important view – but only a limited view . A sophisticated “one view” needs to be built custom at each customer today .

It is easy for a user to drown in data in a Buisness suite. Imagine a world where the CXOs can look at a financial statement , which shows exceptions that need attention and they can just navigate to that one transaction that caused that exception . That itself will get them drooling . Now imagine if they can also get prioritized recommendations of what can be done to fix the exception ?

Suite has all the information a business user needs – and an excellent security model to go with it . What is missing is flexibly organizing an enterprise view of a slice of the business and seeing the exceptions . There are many parts of suite that facilitate drill down today – but that is not exception based . You need to drill down endlessly to find the issues . That is when users give up , consultants make a living and MS excel becomes default answer .

What about the lay user ? The biggest problem for a lay user in ERP is searching for information . If an AR clerk knows an order number or a customer address for a shipment that wasn’t paid for – she will need to know specific search helps or reports to find related information . If you look at a standard selection screen on sapgui – you probably won’t expect a lay user to find a way to use it meaningfully . Making it html5 doesn’t solve it – it needs a new UX from scratch to make a difference . Why not give a system wide free form search that all users can use ? Suite has an extremely good data model – granted it has meaning only in ABAP dictionary and not at database . But there is a way to make it work – so why not do that ? Just for search alone – I am sure there are customers who will pay a premium .

What about less tables in data dictionary and less data footprint due to compression ? Geeks like me absolutely love it – but with storage prices going down steadily , and infrastructure getting commoditized – it doesn’t come across as a compelling message by itself for a buyer . At best – the nested tables and less data should be positioned as a way to get to better usability features in future .

While on the topic of simplification – we should also remember the reason SAP became popular was the ability to extend standard code with custom ABAP code. Back in the day it was user exits – and then many other things came in as technology improved . But there is a problem with user exits in general – most of them are at a line item level of a document . This means a database cannot help speed up the code since the logic needs to be executed in abap server in a loop for each line . Will “run simple” mean that suite will now have a lot of additional BAdIs that will understand set operations ? That would be super cool .

Technical simplification is of little to no interest to business – and SAP messaging and product strategy should reflect that .

In the same vein – when people think of a modern suite helping them close books faster , there needs to be a sensible expectation . Not all parts of suite are real time . And even when everything is optimized to be real time – there are things like depreciation that only happen periodically . So while it is correct to say close will be faster – close itself won’t be real time for near future .

Another aspect of faster close needing an expectation setting is when we think of end to end processes . When we close books – there are things like consolidations and inter company eliminations and so on that need to happen. Those don’t always happen in suite . So they need an external system talking to suite and that means that even if suite is real time , you can’t exactly have a real fast close as a business process . This is all still better than the slow closing process today – but if customers have an unreasonable expectation of real time close etc, they will be severely disappointed .

What about good old reporting ? This is the biggest miss for SAP suite today in my mind . SAP has all the knowledge and IP and technology to embed BI in suite apps . Yet we still see the same abap reports today in ECC that I have used in 90s when SAP had black and white screens . Hana live would be a whole lot more palatable to customers if there was BI content on it . I hope one day we will start seeing SAP bring these two worlds together .

What about Hana enterprise cloud for hosting ERP ? I don’t think SAP will be a great data center company and hosting margins are not comparable to software margins . A Management utilities layer built by SAP and licensed to partners who are already in infra business seem better to me than running infrastructure themselves . The IBM announcement seems to be in this direction and I liked it .

I make a lot of fun of “social” and it’s fluffiness . But I will be the first to admit that in the context of ERP , collaboration is actually the killer functionality – right after search functionality . Vast amounts of time and money is spent on rigid workflows and email and calls today and it is the epitome of inefficiency around ECC users everywhere . SAP already has Jam – they just need to sell it everywhere .

Last point – APIs . A modern suite should be able to provide a rich set of APIs to developers to build quickly around it . HCP is already a recommended approach to build extensions . The Apigee partnership provides management . ECC already has a lot of BAPIs (granted – they have God awful interfaces that only abap developers understand, and that needs to be simplified ). All the raw ingredients are already there – including BI and ETL . All that remains is a bit of engineering to make them work together and build a message around using HCP for the install base customers . SAP has a huge developer ecosystem that can make use is all this . I am betting on my friend Steve Lucas and team telling us more about this soon . There is nothing about SAP today that makes me more excited than Hana Cloud Platform .

Rant over and I wish all my pals an exciting time at Teched . Have fun ! I heard that the Keynotes are going to be run like never before 🙂

It’s about time we set a higher bar for analytics


First off – I have no interest in being nuanced here about data vs information , big data vs regular data , BI vs Analytics vs Reporting and so on . Use the terms you like in the following rant . If all we missed today was the nuance between these terms , we would have been in a better place already .

There might not be a more tired part of technology out there today than Analytics . It’s been a top CIO concern for as long as I can remember . It is a top concern for me personally as an executive running a business at my employer . There are very few people who are truly happy with their ability to make sense of data . And no wonder BI companies young and old are all thriving and marketing their hearts out that they are already in “next gen”.

Big data – and the Gartner 3V model – brought good focus on information management side . But it did not exactly democratize “data based decision making “.

We don’t need to get into high volume or velocity or variety of data to see the failings of today’s BI . The thought leadership in analytics is along the lines of “ask good questions to get good answers”. This is a much needed part of analytics for sure – we should have the sophistication in our systems to answer the best and most complex questions . However – that should be more of a table stakes thing in the world of data .

For analytics to take a leap into “next gen” – pretty visualization is not enough either . It is a little more along the way into future than the ability to answer complex questions . An answer is not good if the user does not understand what the system is trying to say . So yes – let’s find more and more ways to visualize data . It’s a good thing that some companies got started with it and are making progress .

Before I leave the topic of visualization – I have to say this . For a given question and its answer , computers must be able to provide a default representation that is the “theoretical best” , without a user being asked to create a representation from scratch every time . By all means – allow the user to change things around , but there is very little value in making a user guess what is the best representation visually . The type of chart , positioning in screen , scale , default filters are all things that software should be able to figure out by itself . Personalization is important – but again it should be treated as table stakes by now .

But there is a gap that still remains at the core . If the best we can do is “ask good questions to get good answers”, we are still stuck in the world of art , and refusing to move a bit closer to science .

My hope is that we start building systems that can
1. look at available data and start by
2. offering clues to what kind of questions can be asked of it ,
3. what kind of meaningful patterns the software can be seen already ,
4. and what kind of data would be great to add to currently available data set to make even better inferences .

Sure , the person who can ask better questions will still retain their edge in making better use of the data – but if the system can prompt decent questions to users , I think this whole promised land of “data driven decisions” would be a lot closer to where we are now than if we inched along the current trajectory .

This might be really hard to do as a generic horizontal platform capability in near future . But if vendors focused on taking this approach for targeted vertical apps , a lot of these challenges can be mitigated . Such learning can then be used to build horizontal general purpose solutions over time if it makes sense .

It all starts with setting a higher bar of expectations of analytics – incremental innovation won’t cut it .

Before we pelt social media stones on Satya Nadella …


Satya Nadella is a very visible technology industry leader who made a totally wrong and awful comment about women asking for wage increases .

Over the last couple of days there has been a storm in social media crying for his head . Shortly after the gaffe – he admitted publicly that he was wrong , and that women should just ask for a raise of they need it .

In my mind – that was the right first step in righting a wrong . But clearly I am in the minority in thinking so . Many people I admire and respect – like industry analysts and CXOs think saying “sorry” does not count . Some believe he should be fired . Some others don’t exactly say what they actually want him to do – except that something beyond saying “sorry” is needed .

I don’t think he should be fired at all . All leaders – all humans – make mistakes . The honorable thing to do is to admit openly when they are wrong , and do something to fix the problem and trying hard not to make the same mistake again .

In this case – he did say sorry and he agreed that women who feel they need a raise should just ask . Now it is up to Microsoft women employees to ask him for raises when they feel they deserve it and for him to give it in deserving cases . Not just women – any minority , or even any employee – should enjoy that at their place of work . Bosses should ALWAYS encourage employees to speak up .

Microsoft diversity numbers look like pretty much every other big company – gender/ethnic and all other kinds of equality still remain elusive . So it is not just Satya -every leader should be held accountable to making this right .

Also I wonder if this is a problem with male leaders alone . There are a minority of F100 companies like IBM, HP, Pepsi etc where CEOs are female – are their diversity situation much better ? If not these women leaders should be held to the same high standards too I would think .

A big problem with the fight against inequality is the lack of unity amongst Minorities . Women are a minority – physically challenged folks are a minority , Hispanics and blacks are Minorities and so on . They all fight for their right to be treated as equals – but only for themselves . Why not join forces and make the collective voices heard ?

( Example – It always has amused me when some Indians who have gained US citizenship make fun of the folks coming after them in the immigration queue on an H1B . )

It was interesting that no peer CEO of Satya defended him nor criticized him in public . And as far as I could see on social media – they were not asked for their take by the journalists and bloggers either .

The current rhetoric is mostly against Satya, not the underlying problem of inequality . Are we outraged because he sounded honest but not politically correct ?

What exactly is the priority here ? This is a country that had a president who falsely went to war claiming weapons of mass destruction , and another who lied under oath after marital indiscretion. Both seem to be popular till today , though their actions failed entire populations . Neither one even remotely made a meaningful apology but were politically correct . Even they were forgiven . What Satya did was wrong – but not as terrible as what two presidents did . If we can forgive the presidents of USA , I would think we can give a second chance for a CEO too.

I can’t speak for Satya at all – but I have a hypothesis on what made him say the awful thing he did . He is a young CEO who had a fast track career . He probably never had to ask for raise in his career . He might have assumed – wrongly – that his own experience ( or Karma ) is applicable to women employees too . Hopefully we will learn more with time .

What I would like to see happen positively out of this episode is two things

1. the world holding all leaders – at all levels – accountable to principles of equality , rather than unleashing fury on just one CEO .

2. Women – and anyone else who feels like they deserve a raise – being encouraged to speak up , and their leaders acting on it constructively

PS : Just saw the first hand commentary of the lady who interviewed Mr Nadella . Even she is surprised at the twitter fire storm

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/harvey-mudd-college-president-reacts-to-nadella-s-comments-m3CzZR0dTDOVXZCkeV34Rw.html