deal architect

Plex: From shop floor to top floor

I was surrounded by high-tech. I flew into the Delta McNamara terminal in Detroit with its ExpressTram which uses air cushion levitation like a hovercraft. The terminal is connected by a passenger tunnel which celebrates LED art. I stayed at the Renaissance Center where GM shows off its latest auto technology. PowerPlex, the Plex user conference, was at the Cobo Center which also hosts the annual North American International Auto Show, which attracts a million visitors all using its wi-fi and watching exhibits which leverage AR/VR and AI. Barrie Vince, Plex's "Q" showed up on stage as a roving display, as if to wave goodbye to Sheldon at the end of the Big Bang Theory show. Plex customers like Seven Marine had brought props like their luxury boat engine rated at 627 horses. Partner booths were displaying scanners and sensors.

But what stood out for me this week was something analog and likely boring to many - a board with printed sheets of metrics. It was at the plant of a Plex customer, College Park Industries, a maker of prosthetics. Every technology vendor these days has "Digital Boardrooms" and dazzling analytics in their demos. But how many demo you those at their customer's facilities? And even more specifically at their shop floors or warehouses or emergency rooms being used by blue collar employees? And show operational metrics related to quality and logistics?

I have been lamenting that even after two decades of cloud applications, if you look at a grid by industry and country you can mostly find application coverage in financial, HCM and CRM processes and there mostly for N. America and English speaking world. Product design? Scrap management? Kiva robots in the warehouse? Not our problem, these vendors seem to think even as they claim "enterprise-wide" coverage.

Which is why I look forward to visits with Plex. Over the years they have taken us to tours of shop floors of customers like Fisher Dynamics, Trojan Battery and Sanders Chocolate each with unique manufacturing, packaging and other engineering challenges. They invite us to spend time with their Customer Advisory Board which represents an even wider range of industries and operational details. Jargon such as auto-release, LPN barcodes, pull efficiency and traceability is common.

While Plex tends to rely on its customers to take it overseas, it is common to hear about its global reach at its events. An exec from Stant talked to me this week about their plants in Czech Republic, China and S. Korea. On stage was Toyotetsu which supplies parts to a number of Japanese automakers.

While most events have inspirational speakers, Plex tends to bring in keynoters like Mike Rowe who talk about solving the perennial shortage of blue collar workers. At this conference, Dean Kamen, inspirational in his own way with his string of inventions including Segways and insulin pumps, talked about how he has helped transform Manchester, NH, a textile town couple of centuries ago into a modern day high-tech magnet. He talked about FIRST and getting young kids interested in robotics. Not just talk - action about closing the advanced manufacturing skills gap. 

 

Beyond the manufacturing focus, Jerry Foster, CTO presented on a machine learning project which, frankly, systems integrators should have long been working on. Most of them have industry templates with pre-defined configurations of systems parameters. The Plex project has analyzed such templates across its customer base and identified potentially newer ones that could benefit several of its implementations. Going forward, hopefully, such parameter configuration activity can be significantly automated and reduce dependence on consultants.

Of course it is not just manufacturing sectors which are looking for modern operational systems. Markets don't wait for ever and I have been researching startups, SIs, corporate buyers who are targeting various verticals.

Plex has new executives led by CEO Bill Berutti, with significant manufacturing experience at PTC. He did a nice job hosting this year's PowerPlex. While he is disciplined in executing to Plex's current path, I am hopeful he will allow me to periodically distract him. There are just too many operational application white spaces across industries and geographies to ignore.

Teflon SAP?

In the ASUG Executive Exchange on Monday morning at Sapphire I joked that it was fitting that we had yet another rumor floating - would Bradley Cooper show up with Lady Gaga at her concert later in the week? I cannot remember a Sapphire with so much rumor and speculation in the build up to the event. I was impressed how SAP executives handled much of it during the event. In one on ones, however, several of them were hurt and even angry about the coverage. Even more striking was how little customer execs had heard about or cared about the chatter.

Some of the topics about which there has been some wild speculation

Qualtrics

Yes, it was an expensive acquisition - a "high-beta" one. I am not a big fan of M&A in software. But in my new book, I point out several trillion dollar markets SAP, Oracle, IBM and others missed out on in the last couple of decades - digital advertising, smart products, cloud infrastructure etc. So I cannot fault Bill McDermott for betting a pile of chips on his view that the "experience economy" is going to be a massive one. Not only will it differentiate SAP's CX offering it is already opening up product design, employee engagement and other new opportunities for SAP. It also allows SAP to benchmark and reshape its own product ideation and customer relations. And it has brought a new breed of impressive, high energy execs into the SAP ranks.

HANA

There was some really irresponsible "HANA is dead" speculation. I told several journalists and analysts weeks ago I was baffled by the talk. So it was nice to hear Hasso Plattner after lowering expectations that his was an "old-style", "low-cost" keynote then proceed to announce “SAP HANA is too good a database just to lock it inside SAP enterprise applications,” Watch this keynote where along with Gerrit Kazmaier, he set ambitious new goals for HANA and for the broader portfolio of SAP's analytical offerings. 

Layoffs

There has also plenty of talk about layoffs including some of my colleagues asking for more "openness" from SAP on the topic. I was in Salt Lake City with several of the execs as they were being announced and I could see the hushed conversations. I chose not to pry given the legal and HR considerations that surround such moves. Besides, as I write in my book, SAP has to evolve to a much more cloud, open-source, machine learning savvy culture. So do its systems integrator partners. So do its customers. Continuing with legacy customizations is a growing security and compliance risk. Much worse, it is a recruiting liability when trying to attract younger technical talent. The transitions at SAP are just a start. The ripple effects will be felt throughout SAP Nation. The sooner we start planning for them the better, and we should not just hammer SAP for kicking them off.

Management changes

Nick Tzitzon, EVP of Marketing and Communications had told me "we have individuals in some cases who collectively have worked for SAP for 100 years, and who decided that it was time to try something else in their career. Does this not happen in every company?" Hasso Plattner was even more emphatic when he told a few of us that several customer executives have marveled at the smooth transition. He told us SAP is much "younger" now and he has never been more proud of the company. Watch this keynote and see the energy of execs like Christian Klein, Ryan Smith, Jen Morgan and others

Elliott investment

Geoff Scott, CEO of ASUG had to explain to an audience of customers who exactly Elliott is. That calm struck me as radically different from the panic I have heard from of my media colleagues. Yes, Elliott is a feared force as an activist investor but I am familiar with at least a few executives who have worked collaboratively with them. I liked Bill McDermott's comments during a Q&A “I’m very confident in our top- and bottom-line development,” McDermott said, and that he and the Elliott reps were “psyched” by SAP’s prospects. As I write in my book, there is a huge opportunity in "tilting the bell curve" - transitioning ECC and customizations, BW, S/1 to the new portfolio of S/4, C/4, SAC, SCP, Qualtrics, SuccessFactors, Ariba and many other products SAP now has to offer.

My book

Finally, I am bracing for potshots about my book. I had a chance to give my book to both Hasso Plattner and Bill McDermott. I warned them both it had many sections which would make them cringe. They were both gracious in their thanks - can I dare say they are mature enough not to expect a puff piece from me? But if hear some of my colleagues who have clearly not read the book, you would conclude it is an unqualified endorsement of SAP. I had a chance to sign several copies for SAP customer executives this week. Trust me they are not looking for fawning support of SAP when they talk to me.

No, Bradley Cooper did not show at the concert. But Lady Gaga was amazing on her own. I did not know much about her music prior to the concert but you have to admire her amazing pipes, incredible energy and her body of work. More importantly you have to acknowledge the sheer admiration she got from the audience. SAP is not everyone's cup of tea, but you have to similarly admire its wide body of work and the fact that it is the backbone for over 400K customers.     

I heard an executive say this week media attention on any topic lasts about 5 days. You wait that long and any PR crisis will blow over. That is not a compliment to our analyst/media side of the fence. We have to take the much longer customer view points when they invest in technology.

From my side, this week made me resolve to be even more careful in my reporting and to continue to validate my viewpoints with even more customer conversations.  

"I have never been so proud to be part of this company"

Said Hasso Plattner as we were wrapping up our annual Sapphire meeting with him. He told us he thought Bill McDermott's keynote this morning was the best he has delivered (I had walked up to Bill a few hours earlier and told him roughly the same thing, for different reasons as I describe below). He raved about Jen Morgan and her attention to detail. He is just as pleased with the other members of the new management team. He said customers have complimented him about the smooth executive transition over the last few weeks. He was energized and as we will see in his keynote tomorrow dispel rumors that have been swirling around HANA the last few weeks.

I liked Bill's keynote because it highlighted global companies like Apple, Under Armor, Shell, Tapestry and SAP itself tackling complex issues in product design, manufacturing, field service, joint venture accounting, retail and digital transformation. It is such a contrast to the competition which pretends that its financial and CRM cloud functionality is all that an enterprise needs.

The keynote and a sneak preview walk through we got of the show floor even as the roadies were still moving booth material in their fork lifts gave me the solid feeling that SAP is back as the dominant application vendor. There are 5 massive "neighborhoods" centered around People engagement, Network and spend management, Customer experience, Supply chain and the Digital core and a section on 25 verticals.

ASUG had invited me to present on themes from SAP Nation 3.0 to its Executive Exchange on Monday. It explained to them why on balance the book comes out positive about SAP. If I had waited till this Sapphire to finish, I have a feeling the book would have come out even more positive.

The Orange County Convention Center advertises 2.1 million square feet of exhibition space. Given the scope and ambition of SAP's application coverage, in the not too distant future, I think it will be able to use all that space.

Competitors watch out - you have one heck of an energized application vendor.  

The Oracle Enigma

Rimini Street recently conducted a survey of Oracle customers. Oracle and Rimini have long been in litigation, so I would read the results with a nuanced viewpoint, but it does not paint the picture of a very happy Oracle Nation.

As an analyst, I am particularly interested in products and competitive positioning.  One of the more intriguing sub-plots in my writing SAP Nation 3.0 was looking at why its competitors did not go for the jugular. 5 years ago, when I wrote the first volume, SAP's image suffered from the massive failures and writeoffs, it appeared distracted by HANA, its next-gen ERP, S/4 was immature. Customers were ring-fencing SAP, moving to third party maintenance and two-tier ERP. In many ways, SAP was on the ropes. 

As I say in the book

"Partly because SAP’s competitors did not target it aggressively enough, and partly because its own cloud acquisitions and developed products afforded it a shield, the company has come through the threat of the last five years relatively unscathed. In fact, when you look at the mob of strong competitors that it had to fend off, it has done remarkably well. In those five years, SAP’s customer count has actually increased by 50%. Wall Street has not been as generous to SAP as it has to cloud vendors, but the existential threat that SAP faced has passed."

The competition is not just Oracle, but as the largest application competitor to SAP, I wondered why they did not have more momentum in the last five years. It's partly because the Oracle functional scope in the cloud does has not appear to have grown significantly. I wrote recently

"In October 2018, Oracle co-CEO Hurd predicted that 80% of business applications would be in the cloud by 2025....Today, even after two decades of cloud computing, industry and geographic coverage is spotty — by my estimate, less than 20%. For Hurd’s prediction to prove accurate, it will take massive new investments in upgrading industry functionality."

Will Hurd's own products grow rapidly and get a lion share of his projected 80%? In January 2006, Oracle had confidently declared they were "Halfway to Fusion". 13 years later, Oracle still mostly talks finance, HCM and CRM. NetSuite, even after 20 years, has limited global coverage as Phil Wainewright points out here or industry coverage as I point out here."   

Beyond applications, I was excited about its autonomous database, but wondered why they had to bundle it with their IaaS. When it was introduced, I wrote this. I have also been puzzled why the Oracle IaaS had not focused on its and other on-premise customer bases. I wrote this 3 years ago.

I write this from SAP's Sapphire show. I spent yesterday at the ASUG (user  group) Executive Exchange. There was vigorous conversation on a wide range of topics, many like Indirect Access which makes SAP cringe. My schedule for the week shows small group settings with key executives. I attended a couple of sessions at the Partner summit. We got a sneak preview of the show floor even as the roadies were still setting up.  Jon Reed has polled several "Mentors" and influential developers in the SAP community. There is a definite openness to all this. The week prior Workday allowed us access to most of their product executives at their analyst summit. Next week Plex is taking us to (another) customer plant, and has several executive sessions for analysts as part of their user conference. More openness.

I have asked for Oracle for a similar, much more open analyst summit and have been told it's not likely to happen any time soon. May be it's just me with all these questions. But I suspect my analyst colleagues have other questions about the vibrancy of its database, its platforms and other products. We all want Oracle to be a strong competitor, but with so many questions, it would be nice to have much more open conversations.  In the meantime, I will have to rely on Oracle partners like OppSource to describe innovations as Mark Galloway does here.

Frankly, they can easily ignore us analysts. It's customers they need to focus on - the Rimini survey is a symptom of what they need to turn around. 

The Paradox of Selling Progress: a guest post by Mark Galloway

Mark Galloway and I go back to our respective Lawson and Gartner days. I caught up with him recently - he is Co-Founder & CEO of OppSource, developers of next-gen sales engagement tools. He told me of an interesting use case of his tools as he describes below.

After watching multiple waves of “transformative” technologies come and go in the enterprise over the past 30 years, none in my opinion have been as transformative as what we are seeing with the “Amazon effect”.  No, I am not talking about AWS or the cloud.  Rather, I am talking about the online consumer shopping experience that many of us interchangeably call “Amazon” regardless of whether we are actually shopping at Amazon or some other online retailer.  You ask, so what does Amazon have to do with transformation in the enterprise?  Let me tell you, a lot.  As consumers, we have taken our desired consumer experience for self-service and moment-of-interest engagement into every corner of the workplace.  The net result, we have created a new normal for a radically different B2B buying journey.  We don’t want to talk with salespeople until we absolutely have to, and in many cases, we don’t ever “have to”. 

On the other side of the commerce equation, sellers are having to quickly and radically change their sales coverage models to adapt to us modern buyers.  The days of press-fleshing sales calls are waning. The cost/per sales engagement for this traditional sales approach used with today’s modern buyer is no longer economically feasible.  As a result, companies everywhere in every industry are now grappling with how to transform their sales coverage models to grow more profitably. 

Many organizations have favored hiring young, smart, and high-energy “inside sellers” who come with almost no business, industry or product acumen.  Why hire on this profile?  Because they can force high velocity and high-volume outreach and engagement efforts on these young go-getters at a fraction of what they were paying their expensive, highly compensated field-based predecessors.  Yes, these new reps are sharp and yes, they are quick learners, but without any contextual understanding or experience, smart learning can only take them so far.  The paradox of progress for the modern buyer is that while they don’t want to talk with salespeople until they absolutely have to, when they do, they want to speak with someone who brings value and relevance to their unique buying situation.  The current hiring model for insides sales teams that many companies are using is out of alignment with the modern buyer’s sales experience expectations.

This is where artificial intelligence and machine learning can lend these young sales guns a hand.  Imagine as a young rep, being prompted with questions to ask, similar customer stories to tell, and appropriate product/solutions to position all while you are engaged real time with one of these modern buyers.  This is all being made possible by leveraging machine learning and AI to listen to conversations.  Using modern AI and machine learning models, sales reps can be provided these real-time prompts that will augment the missing business, industry, and product acumen that next generation sales reps will need. Working together, salesperson and machine will be able to satisfy the buyer’s expectations for a modern sales experience, one that comes as the highly personalized and relevant engagement they desire.

As an example, Lifetouch, the nation’s largest K-12 school photography studio used to rely on field sales people to drive around and call on schools in their local territory.  This model worked well in days gone by. However, the modern security measures employed by most schools today discourages unsolicited sales calls and in many cases are not even allowed.  Coupled with these security changes, today’s modern school administrator have enormous time constraints just keeping up with running their schools.  They simply don’t have time to meet spontaneously with sales people of any variety. These market changes required Lifetouch to rethink their sales coverage model. 

They chose to hire recent college grads as inside sellers who work collaboratively with strategically located field sales specialists.  Their job is to line up scheduled and qualified appointments with school principals and other picture day decision makers at schools.  But getting engaged with enough of these contacts to keep a field team of sales people busy with qualified meetings required a much higher volume and velocity of market outreach than what these inside sellers could do with just a phone and their CRM.  They needed a specialized system that provides touchplan automation, AI and machine learning to capture conversation data, and automatically setup callbacks, and appointments.  Working with our company and our OppSource Sales Engagement Platform, they saw the average revenue per rep driven by their inside sellers grow 4X over 24 months.  An incredible ROI by anyone’s standards.

This type of progress driven by AI and machine learning is coming quickly.  A recent McKinsey Institute study found that by 2020, as much as 80% of transactional sales related functions will be possible with Ai and machine learning. 

If your sales organization isn’t experimenting with AI and Machine learning to augment your evolving sales force, you may soon experience the paradox of progress.

You can reach Mark at mark DOT galloway AT oppsource DOT com

 

Sapphire 2019: A curtain raiser with Nick Tzitzon

As I prepare to drive to Orlando for the annual SAP conference I had a chance to talk to Nick Tzitzon, EVP of Marketing and Communications about what we can expect on the main stage.

If you think about the big picture, Vinnie, in terms of where the economy is and where our customers are, we approach SAPPHIRE with a really clear view of the challenges that we need to address and the opportunities we need to seize.

If I had to give you the top three headlines, number one is continuing to deliver on promise of the intelligent enterprise, which as you recall is something we launched last year. This was the pinnacle moment, if you will, in terms of what we always knew that the SAP HANA era would lead to for SAP. Our customers know it’s a big data world. They know that they need end-to-end connectivity in their business. They’re hungry for the exciting machine learning use cases and the new wave of industry best practices. You’ll see a lot more of this in Orlando.

Look for Bill McDermott to make the argument that we want our customers to focus on something of a cultural transformation. The idea here is “you need all people inside companies focused on people and opportunities outside of companies.” Demand chain integrates to supply chain in any truly digital business model.

This leads me to the second headline, which I think will surprise a lot of attendees in terms of the energy it creates in the SAP community. In looking openly at the same challenges facing our customers, we recognized there’s a big gap we needed to solve for. No company in our industry at scale, not SAP, not our competitors, could bring in real-time experience data to complement operational data. This goes directly to the culture change McDermott wants to hit. Nobody questions the operational heft of SAP. The question is – how can we help customers direct those systems to what their key stakeholders, customers and employees, actually feel. Experience Everything , Everyone is a Customer, Customer is Everywhere.

It's widely known that we went out to find a partner here. We found not only the market leader, but the pioneer of the experience management category with Qualtrics. SAPPHIRE will now be the largest event ever focused on experience management and helping businesses operate with greater agility in terms of knowing what's going on in their business, knowing why things are happening, being able to connect the two and personalize outcomes to a far greater degree. So while I think people have read the headlines about the Qualtrics deal, I don’t think there’s a full appreciation of the paradigm-shift that experience management on the Qualtrics XM platform will enable.

Number three, I think the consistent feedback you see, not just from reading about SAPPHIRE, but from reading about all vendor events in this industry, the customers do a better job talking about the solutions than the vendors do. Perhaps this a career-limiting admission for someone in the marketing and communications function, but I’m willing to take the risk. This year we made a concentrated effort to bring as many customers to Orlando as we can to let them tell the stories, to let them explain the experience they're having with SAP, why they chose SAP, why they're excited about the idea of experience management as the latest frontier for the intelligent enterprise.  You're going to see hundreds of customer-led sessions, and the dominant ‘red thread’ is that customer testimonials will be steering the conversation. 

Those would be, at a high level, the three things I think about.

In terms of product announcements, we're going to do a lot around SAP HANA. I can’t tell you how aggravating it is to read speculation in the media about our product strategy. Josh Greenbaum wrote a nice piece about this earlier this week. HANA remains—as Bill calls it--the intellectual foundation of SAP. You're going to see Hasso do what he does best as we blaze a new trail in the data management space with some announcements about SAP HANA, which is very exciting. 

You're also going to see some additional progress being made on the idea of combining experience management and intelligent enterprise capabilities. You have heard us talk about this as “X Data plus O Data.” You'll see some early releases, giving developers the tools to build on our platform and accentuate the capabilities of X plus O. There'll be exciting announcements on this front as well.

You have another breakout on C/4HANA?  Is Qualtrics going to be more in that? Is that its own sub-event within the big tent? 

Qualtrics is going to be everywhere, first of all. CX LIVE is the customer experience event focused on SAP C/4HANA and the five integrated clouds that run in that suite. Frankly, the interest has been so high since it was announced last year, we had to do a dedicated CX track at SAPPHIRE because we ran out of space. That’s why Alex Atzberger and his team are hosting CX LIVE as a separate but connected track in Orlando. I’m sure Alex will happily tell you that it's a bigger crowd than they anticipated, which is good news. I should also say that any registered SAPPHIRE attendee can also participate in CX Live. Bill will appear with Alex at CX LIVE.  Ryan Smith from Qualtrics will appear there. It’s going to be a fun event. 

What about all the drama over the last few weeks?  Will Bill touch on it? Are you going to let the media openly ask their questions?

Yeah, I think the media, influencers, analysts, can and should ask any questions they want.  Personally, I don't see the drama. People have been following us for years and have very high expectations for us. Bill tells us all the time – take the high interest in SAP as a compliment that people believe we’re a significant company with a lot riding on us. Having said that, I worry that much of what’s out there right now has largely been the result of speculation and not necessarily the result of facts. In the case of the executive departures, we have individuals in some cases who collectively have worked for SAP for 100 years, and who decided that it was time to try something else in their career. Does this not happen in every company?

And the other piece of those changes, we have a particularly strong bench of talent at the leadership level and at the engineering level. Names like Adaire Fox-Martin, Christian Klein, Jennifer Morgan, Juergen Mueller, Thomas Saueressig, Gerrit Kazmaier, Abdul Razack. I think these leaders and the quality work done by our engineers will be on display at SAPPHIRE. Maybe the only thing that will quiet the conspiracy theories is seeing a totally thriving SAP in action in Orlando. So I guess I’m happy it starts next week.

Vinnie, I'm normally, as you know, somebody who is pretty sensitive to what's going on across the company, and I feel like the company is going in with a full ahead steam with a pretty clear sense of what it has to accomplish.  I just don't see a lot of this so-called drama.

While I understand there is some sensational stuff in the media, we put more credibility in the facts.

If there’s any learning I have from all this, it’s that we need to do a better job over-communicating about everything. We know what our customers expect, we know what our shareholders expect, we feel motivated and excited about the future. That’s the story I personally need to do a better job getting out into the influence channels.

Any other big announcements?  Any other directional stuff?

You’ll see a re-invigoration on the industries focus from us. There's a lot of really good content we're going to have at Sapphire on the industry side, a lot of good road mapping and best practices. 

You're going to see a lot on the ecosystem. I think our partners are fired up for SAPPHIRE.  You're going to see some more detail in terms of how our partnerships with cloud infrastructure providers have matured. These are topics that we know the SAP customer base is interested in, so they will be well featured at the event. 

I also think you're going to see an increasingly good balance between the technology topics and the business topics. This is something that all vendors struggle with. We, like many, have an audience that comes from multiple perspectives, but what we really like about the intelligent enterprise, particularly now in the context of the experience economy with experience management from Qualtrics, this is a conversation that bridges the gap between business and technology.  It completely unites the value chain on what needs to be done to keep companies successful or, in cases where they're struggling, gets them back on the right track. SAP is talking end-to-end now in multiple respects and we're excited for SAPPHIRE, if for no other reason, because it's our best opportunity of the year to show people just how complete and broad our portfolio is and how complete our strategy is in terms of giving them the tools that they need to be successful.

Plus, we're going to be distributing copies of exciting, new, future best-selling books. In case you have any recommendations in that regard.

Well I know at least one person - the publisher of SAP Nation 3.0 - will enjoy that drama :)

Thanks for the sneak preview.

Digital Transformations: Too little, too late?

I find Frank Scavo a great sounding board.  He has a way of simplifying things and pushing back when things are buzzword-y. I have quoted him in several books. He has introduced me to case studies I have profiled in my books and blogs.

I liked his recent post on Digital Transformations, especially the graph on left.

But it reminded me of 2 things.

In The New Polymath, I had invoked Doblin's (a design strategy firm) 10 types of innovations. You could take Scavo's graph and nuance it some more.

However, the key point I want to make is I started to write that book in 2009. It was inspired by innovative people, products and places I had been cataloging on the New Florence blog since 2004.

In 2012, in The New Technology Elite I had bunches of examples of companies making smart products - taking analog products of the past and embedding sensors, software, satellite and mobile support. They had started designing those products years before.

In 2014, I helped Karl-Heinz Streibich wrote The Digital Enterprise. It cataloged a number of companies rethinking their supply chains, their business models. They had been doing it for years.

In 2016, in Silicon Collar I cataloged companies in over 50 work settings changing their business processes with all kinds of automation - robotics, drones, wearables, 3D printing etc etc. They had been doing so for years,

In my latest book, SAP Nation 3.0, I point out the countless missed opportunities at some of our favorite vendors. Markets don't wait. Startups, corporations as in healthtech and healthcare, SIs have been developing solutions they should have 

What's my point?

If you are only now starting to think about digital transformation, you likely are years behind many of your competitors and your peers.

Here is something even more sobering. The solutions you are likely looking at also missed out on working with those pioneering customers. Their SI partners will try to convince you the solutions embody "best practices". No, they don't - the best practices belong to those pioneers.

Which is why I was pleased to see Brian Sommer write his new book Digital with Impact. In my review, I wrote:

"Brian Sommer and I go back a long way and we have consulted with clients on several projects he describes in the book. We are both worried that today's "digital' project is becoming the "re-engineering" project of the 90s. It starts off with the right goals, then many companies just implement off the shelf solutions justifying them or being told by their consultants they embody "best practices in a box". End result in 90s was massively expensive ERP and CRM projects and failures. Companies risk making the same mistake again with similarly poor results. This is where I like Brian's 4 step framework - spend plenty of time looking for digital opportunities (not just move your back office to the cloud) and build your own jigsaw of solutions given the plethora of cloud apps, automation technology, developer platforms and other tools available today. I also like his emphasis about thinking about in terms of a circle. Rinse, repeat - don't view it as a project which is one and done. Finally, he has a slew of exercises you can use to encourage lots of back and forth with colleagues.."

Frank is right when he concludes "each digital journey is different, because every company is different." In addition, as I said at the end of my review of Brian's book

"Its important you scream and debate. Opportunities like this come only every couple of decades - you want to do far better than most companies did with the "re-engineering" wave in the 90s."

You are likely late. But in addition, please do not do too little with your digital transformation project.