SAP Mentor !

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I was completely flabbergasted when I heard the news today that I had been awarded SAP Mentorship. Let me first of all congratulate all other new SAP Mentors, namely:

  • Srini Tanikella
  • Leonardo de Araujo
  • Vijay Vijayasankar
  • Shabarish Vijayakumar
  • Martin Gillet

I can’t deny that I was -and still am- surprised about the appointment, because I’ve never exactly been backward in coming forward as far as opinions on most things SAP are concerned. I’ve been working with SAP software since 1997 and since 2004 I am freelancing as SAP Development Consultant. Naturally, all changes and movements in the SAP ecosystem will affect me and my work sooner or later, so I try to keep up to speed as good as I can. More importantly: I try to feed back into the “SAP Land” to my best knowledge and ability.

One thing that I’m constantly trying to distill out of the feeds and blogs that I read or the podcasts I listen to is to emphasise the “real SAP consulting world”. By “real” I mean the world that most SAP consultants face at their clients, implementing the stuff. And that’s one reason why I am so glad to be part of SAP Mentors now, because that’s what most of the mentors do on a day-to-day basis: we’re in the trenches, using and developing SAP, experiencing the pros and cons first hand. Make no mistake, our opinions and views are not the be all and end all, but they are ONE important facet of a complex ecosystem.

Looking ahead, I hope that SAP Mentorship will enable me to contribute to an even larger audience with a stronger voice. I also hope that my contributions will help new and aspiring SAP consultants by giving them down-to-earth advice.

Thank You for appointing me !

This Week in SAP (#9)

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This week’s SAP News picks:

value of current SAP certifications?

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Certifications and SAP’s aim to improve quality of implementations by getting more consultants certified continue to stir a lot of conversation in the SAP Blogsphere. We have yet to see more reports and details coming out of the SAP Mentor Webinar that was held yesterday. SAP’s Mark Yolton posted a blog on SDN yesterday to which I posted a comment on. Please find my comment below :

Hello Mark,
I am a UK based freelance SAP Development Consultant with 12+ years experience. In the past I have participated in many of the SDN discussions and Twitter conversations that you have mentioned in your blog.
Let me first of all start off by emphasizing that SAP customers’ needs for better, more efficient, more reliable and faster implementations are completely understandable. Whether in the past that’s always been entirely skills related is debatable (but that’s also slightly beside the point).

With regards to your blog I was surprised to see that no feedback of today’s SAP Mentor webinar was included. This group, as Dennis Howlett recently pointed out on “Enterprise Geeks” podcast, is an important factor as far as a buy-in into new certification ideas is concerned. Almost none of the SAP Mentors are actually SAP certified, yet are able to do outstanding day-to-day work in SAP-land.

The SAP resource gaps that you have mentioned in your blog are very often filled by experienced SAP experts such as me who work on a contract basis. This is not something that will go away in the short term. My impression (based on working experience in UK and Germany) is that for experienced freelance consultants certification currently is not a guarantee to land that next contract. And I can’t see this changing in the short to medium-term. Why?

  • most clients I work for want me to produce examples of real work and value
  • agents and end clients are not interested if I am certified in the next hot topic, but without previous experience in it (believe me, I’ve tried it)
  • certification courses and admission to TechEd (except Bangalore) are expensive for one-man-bands
  • certifications are just a snap-shot. (If you’re CRM 3.0 certified, what use is this for CRM2007 implementations? re-train every 1-2 years?)

Actually, as far as my first 2 points are concerned, partners and SI’s are in a similar situation, because even if their consultants are certified in a particular new area or topic, they still need that first hands-on, exciting project to implement it. In my experience, I have seen a lot of customers who have suffered from being “bleeding edge”, being the first to use new technology in their area.

With regards to the value and depth of SAP certification in its current offering, you said: “Come join us this year in Phoenix, Vienna, Bangalore, or Shanghai … get your hands on the technology via workshops, hear from experts, and sit for the exam soon afterwards.”. If this means that a few workshops and seminars at TechEd are enough to sit (and pass) an exam that makes someone within up to 3 months a certified consultant than I feel more than confirmed in my doubts. I also feel there is a “get them while they’re hot” attitude which doesn’t help to raise the profile of certifications.

What would be a far better idea is if SAP would improve the way how consultants can acquire skills themselves (I mean beyond the current offerings), especially for those without access to partner or customer systems. Why not introduce a 1-consultant subscription scheme for BS7 or ECC6, sitting on top of the SDN subscription scheme, for example? Why? Current offerings for SDN Subscriptions or by 3rd parties such as www.sidmembers.com don’t reach far enough as these either
a) not offer the application stack or
b) can’t offer cross-client code changes.

You can only improve the quality of your work if you have access to hard- and software at any point in time, not just in a SAP training center. In my mind, this would be a much easier solution, which could potentially feed into a different kind of certification approach for the future, with help and ideas from mentors & community.

Kind regards,
Michael Koch

This Week In SAP (#8)

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traveling the mountains and valleys of SAP land, here are this week’s results:

  • This week’s big news was SAP’s acquisition of cloud computing start-up Coghead. Dennis summed it up best, in my opinion.
  • Now the other big news this week was Anne Kathrine Petteroe’s group opposing the new Terms Of Service (TOS) that the social media site Facebook tried to introduce. Within a couple of days her Facebook group grew to a staggering 100,000+ members, which got a mention in the NYT (in addition to numerous TV interviews!). Anne is now officially the first SAP Mentor to appear on TV and in the future we all have to click our heels whenever we meet her. 😉
  • IBM’s Vijay Vijayasankar didn’t quite make the cut for the news last week, so I include this interesting SDN blog in this week’s roundup. I like real-world blogs such as this, as these contributions try to dig deeper than the marketing material fluff we are usually given. Vijay puts his fingers in the wounds. For example, who will be the first to implement this (skills?) and whether a graphical tool is really needed.
  • Marco ten Vaanholt with an interesting view on Twitter and why it is not valuable for BPXers (and others) – Marco is making some interesting observations, but claiming that some Twitter users are suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder is going a bit far. In the comments Natascha and Oliver sum up nicely my views in terms of value that Twitter can give to all users (SDN, BPX et al)
  • Natural employee fluctuation is not enough: SAP will also need voluntary redundancies (FT Germany: Achtung, German! – translation is here)
  • SAP has now introduced a book for children of its employees explaining “mummy and daddy’s workplace” a little better. I hope this book will be made available to non-SAPers soon, as I sometimes struggle to explain SAP to grown-ups.

This Week in SAP (#7)

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After weeks full of SAP quarterly results announcements and the BS7 launch the last seven days were slow. So here are my SAP-related highlights of last week:

  • Jon Reed’s latest contribution on services and skills required for SAP Business Suite 7.
  • Michael Krigsman blogs on ZDNet about last weeks SAP event in NY, during which a blogger interview with Roche CIO Jennifer Allerton was held. A key point for me is Allerton’s view on system integrators and their (according to her) need to reinvent themselves. “The old Accenture model, where you trained [inexperienced] consultants for many months on your dollar, just doesn’t work anymore. The hardest thing is to get the consultants out at the end of the project, because they try and hang around as much as possible. We do use external consultants very successfully, because you can’t have all the skills in-house.“
  • Eric Imberling of Panorama Consulting Group with a brief and insightful report on how ERP and CRM deployments can help organisations to weather the economic storm.

This week’s SAP Top picks from the Titterverse:

  • @jamesfarar: “Just done w Lunch gig w Prince Charles at Clarence House. He says: ‘SAP? What is that? I can’t keep up with the acronyms’. Hmmmm”
  • @leeprovoost: @chiprodgers how is SAP going to deal with the fact that lots of companies have now “no travel” policies for cost cutting?

An Entirely Virtual SAP TechEd?

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image from Craig Cmehil's Rantings blog

image from Craig Cmehil's Rantings blog

A tweet by Capgemini’s solution architect Lee Provoost today got me thinking about the future and potential of SAP TechEd conferences:

how is SAP going to deal with the fact that lots of companies have now “no travel” policies for cost cutting?

Very aptly Lee pointed to the current economic climate which forced a lot of SAP customers to put a ban on traveling and expenses for conventions such as TechEd. This will be a problem that SAP will have to address when planning and organising the next wave of TechEd conferences taking place later this year and beyond. A while ago Chip Rodgers tweeted about the complications of figuring out the number of potential participants for TechEd given the current economic circumstances (“in this economy, how do we estimate attendance?“). TechEd attendances have been going from strength to strength in recent years, and quite rightly so. On my recent visit to TechEd Berlin in October 2008 I was very impressed with the level of organisation that goes into these events. However (and I sincerely hope otherwise)  2009 and maybe 2010 could be tough years for SAP’s main developer conference. Essentially, this got me thinking of ways out of this and thereby also making a move towards a greener way to cope with traveling as well as a smarter usage of energy.

“The biggest virtual developer convention in the world”

OK, brace yourselves! What if SAP would create an entirely Virtual SAP TechEd conference? Similar to the recent PKOM (Partner Kick-Off Meeting) and also the Business Suite 7 launch, would it not be a fantastic and mindblowing idea to entirely hold a big conference such as SAP TechEd in the virtual space? A combined use of video and microblogging could give an event such as this the feel of true collaboration. Granted, the devil is in the detail here, but there are only a few software companies on the planet that could pull this one off. In my view, SAP is one of them. The benefits and opportunities for such an idea:

  • real savings for customers
  • a truly green event
  • bigger reach to even more developers and BPXers
  • great extension to the current Virtual TechEd format
  • real online collaboration
  • target group for this already used to the web format

Now I can hear some people shouting “Bah Humbug” already, argueing that for example the organisational effort for an event such as this would be phenomenal. Another one: “What about face-to-face meetings, networking and collaboration ?”. Well, maybe, but would not tools such as Twitter (to some degree) prove these critics wrong? There could potentially be small compromises. For example, similar to the break up of SAPphire EMEA into smaller, more regional events, TechEd could go an analogous route by hosting one small main event with speakers/mentors and several satellite venues which would provide web video links to the main event, yet still giving participants a face-to-face option to network and collaborate locally.

Now, I can imagine that clever TechEd people such as Chip Rodgers, Amir Blich, Marylin Pratt or Craig Cmehil (Second Life?) have already been hatching a “Virtual TechEd Masterplan” such as this… or at least I hope they have.