SAP Sapphire short notes #1 Monday started off with a keynote by Henning Kagermann. Good to sit back and listen to a real engineer / philosopher, not a word about "going to market" or "market segmentation".
(Wall Street Journal, take note, these guys are engineers - now go and compare Porsche/BMW with GM and we who's better, the engineer driven or the marketing driven ones!)
All about the stuff, stuff, stuff, and why and how.
Being here as a freely roaming silly questioner a couple of things stuck during the keynote - the things that got me "hmmm...ing".
Henning talked about the clear trend among users to go towards "differentiation", no more standard ways. Well, I like Porter's definition of Strategy - "What value are you to deliver to which customers and how are you going to be different?"
Thus, if not different, no strategy. And lo and behold that is more often the case than not. So upon time standards and "copy the others" is to be replaced with "differentiation". Good, good.
Duet was also demoed, quite convincing, a "change supplier" ad-hoc process was built on the fly for interaction with the core SAP system.
What hit me was, hang on a sec, "finding a new supplier" is first step in any real procurement process is it not? And then a sub process that you have to revisit time and again of course. So why ad-hoc then? Second part of that, ad-hoc is fine and dandy, and next time it'll be a bit different (being ad-hoc built), and third time...
Not to talk about the process not being able to be refined over time nor captured thus masses of knowledge and learning being lost, intellectual capital loss that is.
Obviously Duet is a top layer to the core systems, and addresses what I termed Practices earlier - but should not Practices be as important as the core processes? Much time and resources are used there, suspect most of your daily work time in fact. Think this should be captured better...
Off I go to next meeting, having fun as you can see. I do appreciate the initiative by SAP, letting us roam freely and ask silly questions!
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