At a Sapphire a few years ago, an SAP executive only half-jokingly said he dreamed of a day when SAP implementations would take less than 24 hours. Yesterday at the AMR conference, Shai Agassi said he dreamed of companies going from a McKinsey strategic report to execution in 3 months. Does SAP use the same calendar the rest of us do?
I have never seen a McKinsey report which is ready to execute - you have to translate their generally high quality, but also high level stuff into actionable budgets and workplans. That takes time. And of course technology implementations still take way too long. Especially in larger companies where just organizing a meeting of key stakeholders can take weeks.
On a more realistic note, Shai was asked what percentage of SAP's customer base he anticipated will have moved over to their planned SOA by 2010. He said about half. Now we are on the same Gregorian metric.
