For good governance, investors expect boards strong enough to challenge company management when necessary. In technology, customers expect user groups to similarly challenge managements when there are quality, service and value issues that concern a majority of the base.
Dennis Howlett reports a possible change in leadership at ASUG - the US SAP user group. Like Dennis I have heard murmurs the group had become less interested in serving the U in the acronym and watching more for the V - the vendor.
In some ways, ASUG finds itself at the same juncture as the Oracle Application User Group (OAUG) found itself in the early part of the decade when Oracle was forcing its customer base to migrate to 11i in spite of significant quality problems. OAUG took a confrontational position, to the displeasure of Oracle, but clearly to the benefit of the customer base as Oracle kept slipping the 10.7 de-support date.
With SAP pushing an unpopular maintenance hike, similarly forcing customers to migrate to ECC 6.0, and in the eyes of many customers not delivering much innovation, it would be nice for ASUG to step up for its customer base - even if it has to be confrontational about it.
