I hit the SAP conference circuit hard this fall, attending six conferences in four weeks, four in-person and two online. October saw me live and in-person at SuccessConnect in Las Vegas, SpendConnect in Vienna, and the Cloud ALM Summit in Mannheim; as well as on-line and not well-connected with CXLive at the end of the month. It’s November and, having mustered the courage to sit through a few hours of YouTube videos to catch the highlights of TechEd Bangalore, I spent the second week of the month live and in-person at a most excellent America’s SAP User Group TechConnect in New Orleans. It’s been a helluva month and a half…
This world tour of SAPland has reinforced three key issues: The first is that the enterprise software market has a silo problem. (Obviously –I’ve written about this before, but this trip really brought the problem home.) The second issue is that SAP struggles to get its silo-busting solutions to the right audiences. And the third is that SAP has a conference problem. (Also wrote about this and the content is the printer, experience is the ink problem here.)
The good news is that instead of just crabbing about these issues, I think I have a solution to fix them all. Not all at once, and not immediately, but, hey, these are tough problems to solve. Stick out the preamble and I’ll get to this solution in a minute.
First, the silo problem. Despite the general acknowledgement that SAP’s customers – and those of every enterprise software vendor on the planet – could reap huge productivity benefits from breaking down the process and data silos that inhibit efficiency and innovation, the customers actually doing this are few and far between. It’s not just that it’s hard to do from a technical perspective. Most companies lack the ability to overcome the structural and political silos, the fiefdoms and islands of functionality, that also stand in the way. That political reality on the ground is exacerbated – and perpetuated – by the fact that there’s no clear-cut persona to sell an integrated, end-to-end process vision to: There’s no VP of silo-busting, as it were. In some companies it may be the CFO, in others the COO or CDO, if they have the time and inclination to focus on these problems. More likely, there’s no one at all.
There’s a sales and customer success mecca in store for the vendor that can solve the problem, and SAP and a host of competitors and coopetitioners are all trying to crack this nut and find that elusive enterprise-wide silo-busting buyer. But my recent world tour reinforced the notion that SAP’s best efforts at silo busting aren’t good enough – not for the customers who need their silos busted, nor for the partners who want to do this work, nor for SAP’s own sales and marketing teams, who are frankly struggling with telling and selling the concept. To be honest, no vendor is doing as good a job as they would like: not ServiceNow, not UIPath, not SAP’s erstwhile competitors. This sh*t is hard.
Here’s the bottom line: Despite sincere efforts and some real progress towards dealing with the silo problem and promoting the opportunities that end-to-end process efficiency can provide, SAP (and its competitors) still largely violate one of my principal aphorisms:
The biggest mistake enterprise software vendors make is that they try to sell product the way they build it, not the way it should be consumed.
This silo problem is exacerbated by problem number two: SAP has a problem getting its silo-busting messages to the audiences that need to hear them, which are typically a superset of that elusive buyer audience. The prime example of this can be found in SAP’s aforementioned and very separate HR, spend management, CX, and technical conferences, which take place every year despite the fact that in many ways they only make the silo problem more acute.
This was painfully evident at SuccessConnect, where SAP’s ability to use SuccessFactors to help solve the labor problems that bedevil the global economy were heard by a small subset of the stakeholders – in this case, HR professionals – for whom these solutions are so relevant. Can we all agree that every company of any size in every industry and in almost any geography has massive labor problems that have huge impacts on everything they do? Retailers can’t hire, train and retain enough cashiers, warehouses can’t hire, train, and retain enough stock people, service companies can’t hire, train, and retain enough technicians, hospitals administrators… you get the point, right?
As a sidebar, the day after SuccessConnect I happened to attend a small conference in Las Vegas for organizations and stakeholders focused on providing direct care services to people with developmental disabilities– this was a personal mission, not a professional one – and guess what the number one problem was for everyone in the room?
People.
And yet SAP’s premier people conference had basically a single audience, all of whom were eagerly attending keynotes and sessions, and, even more importantly, engaging as a community in a thousand sidebar conversations that helped turn all the marketing and product information into something real and achievable. The tragedy is that those excellent conversations and messages and descriptions of products and success stories that were told during those three days were likely never heard by any retailer store managers, or field service managers, or warehouse managers, or vice presidents of manufacturing, and on and on.
The same thing happened when I went to Vienna for SpendConnect and watched a largely procurement and supply chain-oriented audience schmooze it up like 2020 had never happened, listening to the excellent messages and description of products and success stories about Business Network and spend management and risk management that were told during those three days. And, once again, it was highly unlikely that any of that took place within earshot of HR managers or retailers or field service managers or heads of manufacturing or any other lines of business professional for whom the mastery of these topics, and the solutions that SAP can present, are absolutely essential to their personal success and the success of their companies.
That same week I went from SpendConnect in Vienna to the Cloud ALM Summit in Mannheim, where I listened to how SAP’s Cloud ALM, alongside Signavio, LeanIX, BTP, and other technologies, can drive process change and business success – a combination of tools and services unlike anything in the industry. The enthusiasm of the audience – mostly partners doing implementations and building new solutions around CALM – was palpable, and the potential for significant impact on overall business success was everywhere.
In this case, the excellent messages, etc. were also not heard by the business leaders whose personal success and the success of their companies could be impacted by what CALM and its associated technologies, wielded by some pretty amazing partners, can deliver. (They weren’t necessarily invited, for the record. It was primarily a partner event. But I’d like to think there was a lot of content at the event that could be of interest to a line of business customer audience.)
With those examples in mind, shall I now deconstruct TechEd, anyone? You get the picture, right?
So on to the third problem, which flows directly from the previous two: SAP has a conference configuration problem. SAP is increasingly eschewing in-person conferences in favor of online conferences at a time when the complexity of the decisions business and technology leaders need to make about innovation and transformation have never been greater, and the questions about how to get it right for any individual company’s needs have never been more pressing. I saw these needs and the value of face-to-face community interaction upfront and in-person four times this fall. Anyone who thinks online conferences are preferable would have seen a lot to hopefully change their mind had they been with me in Vegas and Vienna and Mannheim and New Orleans to watch the power of community in action.
Some quick examples for those who think online-only is the best possible future of enterprise software sales and marketing:
TechConnect: I met a customer transitioning from an AS/400 ERP system to S/4HANA at breakfast the first day of ASUG’s TechConnect, and met another customer doing the same thing at the “Decoding SAP” session my friend and colleague Jon Reed and I ran later that morning. When the first AS/400 customer from breakfast wandered into our session, I introduced the two customers to each other – and while I wasn’t privy to how their conversation went, though I could see them huddling outside our session, it was a perfect example of the potentially incalculable value of in-person events that could never happen online.
I also met several customers at TechConnect who had listened online to TechEd and told me unprompted how glad they were glad to be at an in-person conference where they could actually ask a question of someone who could give them an honest and objective answer. Online just didn’t cut it for them, and many others, despite the fact that TechEd apparently had tens of thousands of online attendees. (For more on TechConnect, check out Jon Reed’s article here.)
SuccessConnect: I wandered around SuccessConnect’s show floor watching customers take an imaginary stroll through a well-designed booth “experience” that traversed the career path of a young woman working at a fictional company called “Cookie Delight” as she trained and upskilled and became a manager. In addition to being able to order a real cookie as part of the experience, attendees got to see screens that mixed HR and ERP data as “Jada” moved up the corporate ladder, and they could talk to very knowledgeable and engaging experts about what this fictitious career path meant in terms of the processes and technology that SAP could enable. The Cookie Delight exhibit became the icebreaker for myriad sidebar conversations I and many others had about talent management, training, and…yummy cookies. (They gave away thousands of cookies, I was told.)
SpendConnect: Interestingly, I heard as much about “total workforce management” from the spend management, Fieldglass perspective as I did at SuccessConnect from the HR professional’s perspective. Too bad the two personas weren’t in the same room to compare notes. We also heard from the keynote stage about how Siemen’s global commodity manager, who previously served in the company’s category management and procurement operations (notably not part of the HR function), made managing contingent labor a strategic asset at Siemens. And then I heard how Save the Children’s CPO made huge strides in supplier visibility and procurement efficiency and wiped out almost $4 million in fraudulent spend, all while training 8000 staff worldwide on their new procurement processes – with nary an HR manager around to see the valuable case they made for the connection between training and supply chain efficiency.
Cloud ALM: I was only there for an afternoon, but I had time to give a talk about the value of the CALM+Signavio+LeanIX+BTP+DataSphere combo to a roomful of partners who readily understood the combined business value. In addition to some fascinating sidebar conversations, I got to be a judge in a hackathon that showcased what partners can do with CALM’s APIs to build valuable add-ons. The hackathon was another great example of community engagement in action. Judging by the wacky costumes and other antics, the partners were having fun and building a strong collective community around this in-person event.
Hopefully you get the picture. So in the grand tradition of consultants making suggestions that take a few words to articulate and thousands of person hours to actually execute, I have a modest solution that I think can solve all three problems at once.
SAP should create an in-person business software event that can help showcase how SAP’s line of business applications, industry solutions, and technology can genuinely bust silos and allow end-to-end processes to drive the productivity and cost-savings customers desperately needed. My vision is that this event will help cross-pollinate thinking among myriad business decision makers – heads of supply chain talking to their counterparts in HR and customer sales, vice presidents of customer service talking to their peers in manufacturing and logistics, and on and on – while making it clear that, when it comes to managing the lifecycle of complex, heterogeneous applications infrastructures, SAP and its partners have some seriously competitive solutions to offer.
Let’s call it BusinessConnect, as there seems to be a fondness for using connect as a suffix for SAP events. I envision BusinessConnect as being comprised of four main components, all under one roof: Three satellite events –a CX event space, an HR/HXM event space, and a Spend Management/Business Network event space – with a technology hub at the center.
The CX space could host, for example, sessions on “CX for supply chain professionals,” or “B2B CX and logistics,” with focused content on the industry-specific functionality that SAP CX can deliver. Over in the HXM space there could be a “Talent management for Retail” and a “Talent Management for Warehouse Managers” track, with additional industry specific content. The Spend Management/Business Network space could host “Supplier Management for Retail” and “Supply Chain Essentials for Customer Service Professionals,” as well Business Network content for specific industries such as automotive, pharmaceuticals, and oil & gas. And on and on.
At the center of these three event spaces would be the technology space, where Cloud ERP and BTP-focused content from SAP and its partners would live. In a similar fashion, the technology space would host sessions on BTP and Cloud ERP tailored to specific business personas, showcasing how different parts of BTP as well as CALM, Signavio and LeanIX can have a direct impact on the business stakeholder’s KPIs.
Adjacent to the technology space could be – if the CEO of ASUG, Geoff Scott, doesn’t decide to smite me for suggesting yet another event after his organization busted their tails pulling off a superb TechConnect in record time – the ASUG space. This would be the place to go for formal customer presentations, like the ones I heard at the most-excellent ASUG for Chemicals event last spring as well as the ones at TechConnect. Call it the no-BS zone for BusinessConnect: Where the marketing and sales hype is peeled away and the unvarnished truth in all its disorder and complexity is told.
The idea is that the messaging in each event space would be cross-pollinated with content for personas whose jobs are impacted by a particular domain, but whose job title wouldn’t fit into the typical audience for a standalone HR or CRM or supply chain/procurement event. In many cases personas like vice president of supply chain, for example, would be cross-pollinating in both CX and HR sessions as well as attending Spend Management sessions, just as a head of retail operations might want to be in sessions in the Spend Management and HR spaces, in addition to attending CX sessions.
It shouldn’t be too hard to create a journey map for a particular LOB persona that would take them back and forth between the different event spaces in order to present them with as complete a picture as possible of how SAP’s different offerings can impact their success. Journey maps based on end-to-end processes could be built that would allow an asset manager, a customer manager, a service delivery manager, a procurement manager, and a shop floor manager to see how SAP’s vision of end-to-end asset maintenance is realized across its portfolio. And of course the persona journey maps or process maps would include stops in the technology space and the ASUG space, depending on the attendees’ interests.
Got it? Not easy to pull off, but my gut tells me it would be worth the effort.
To be honest, the last six weeks were tiring but very energizing, precisely because I found the overall SAP ecosystem more engaged and looking for interaction than ever before. And to a woman and man they were all looking for ways to innovate beyond the gospel of RISE and Joule/AI that SAP is espousing more and more. A few examples: the skills ontology that SuccessFactors is working on; the support for risk management, sustainability, collaboration, and the increasing value coming from Business Network that we heard about at SpendConnect; the industry-specific, end-to-end processes, and the focus on data and analytics showcased at CXLive; the developer experience breakthrough and BTP innovations, as well as the vector database for HANA that were discussed at TechEd. And while customers weren’t really the target audience, the messaging at the Cloud ALM about using CALM and associated tools to manage complex business processes – those end-to-end processes that I’m talking about – could be readily pitched in front of any business audience.
All of which showed how on-target TechConnect’s attendees were for showing up to hear about the innovations that mattered the most to them as opposed to the ones that matter the most to SAP, making it clear that innovation is truly in the eye of the customer: Just moving from AS/400 to S/4HANA was going to a huge innovation for those two companies I spoke with. Proving that it doesn’t necessarily take a RISE, a Joule, or a buy one-of-everything we’re selling perspective to make a huge difference.
One final word – please don’t suggest trying to do this at Sapphire. That tired old show has been adrift for years, its mission a confused hash of sales event, technology showcase, community potlatch, and testing ground for which group can exercise enough power to get their message crammed into what are typically overlong and overwrought keynotes. ASUG’s Annual Conference might be a better platform, it certainly has a much clearer mission to educate and gather together its community. But personally, I think it should stay pretty much the way it is – the no-BS, sale-pitch free zone for customers.
I really, humbly, think this BusinessConnect conference is worth considering. It’s been clear to me for years that cross-pollinating business users is desperately needed. The entire enterprise software industry, overly dependent on single category analyst bake-off reports, is adrift in a sea of silos of its own making. The good news is that SAP understands end-to-end processes, and at each LOB conference the stories are there to be told. It’s the audience that’s missing, or, more succinctly, incomplete.
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