deal architect

Burning Platform: The urgency of thinking about Business as Unusual

In this special 97^th episode of Burning Platform, I invited Geoff Scott, CEO of ASUG to moderate a session with Peter Maier, who heads Strategic Customer Engagements in the Office of the CEO at SAP.

Geoff spends much of the time talking to Peter about his (and Thomas Saueressig) new book, Business as Unusual, that we helped research and write for them. Geoff keeps coming back to the theme of what CIOs and Enterprise Architects can learn from the book, and we provide plenty of reasons why it is worth their while to spend some time, not necessarily read the 300 page book from cover to cover.

No industry has come out unscathed from the recent shocks of COVID, the Ukraine crisis, increasing climate change urgency and massive digital transformations. The book represents across 8 megatrends the massive changes in sectors and countless new edge applications that have become viable, even essential in this changed world. And the book does so in the voice of many customer case studies and partner and analyst commentary.

The graph below shows the 8 megatrends and their relative impact on various industries SAP services

Geoff also probes if a future edition of the book will have more of focus on Generative AI. That leads to the discussion of the current excitement around the technology and the fact that we need a much broader focus on AI and ML for a number of operational applications across most industries.

I love Peter’s comment that he hopes the book encourages customer execs to challenge SAP to solve some of their most complex and unique industry challenges. He invites customers to visit him in Walldorf for a discussion and to pick up a signed copy of the book. He also regularly travels around the world and is very accessible.

An extremely invigorating 40 minute session. Thanks to Geoff for doing a very nice job moderating the flow.   

Business as Unusual – Conversation with Peter Maier at Sapphire Orlando

At SAP’s Sapphire event in Orlando this week, ASUG kindly invited Peter Maier and me to present themes from the Business as Unusual book at their Hub on the show floor.

We covered how the book came about, discussed some of the megatrends in the book – Everything as a Service, Circular Economy, Resilient Supply Chains, Integrated Mobility - and also wove in some of the announcements made at the conference about Industry Networks, AI and others.

We announced that SAP Press has a Sapphire promotion till the end of May. Purchase the ebook or hardcover here and enter the promotion code of SAPPHIRE23 at checkout to qualify for a 22% discount of the list price.

It was a very busy floor and there were multiple parallel sessions so we could not video the conversation but I did manage to record an audio file – we made the conversation interactive with the audience, with free book giveaways and the audio quality is not that great – and I also share below the slides we used.

Here are the links to the

Audio MP3 – about 50 minutes

PDF – 16 slides

 

 

Burning Platform – Even More Business as Unusual

In the 86th episode of Burning Platform, we host repeat guests, Peter Maier and Tilman Goettke of SAP. We discuss reaction to the book, Business as Unusual that Peter co-authored and both Tilman and I helped research and curate - link to the Amazon page via the badge on left.

Peter and Tilman discuss feedback about the book as they have handed out bunch of copies at book signings, podcasts and customer  events. Tilman says he is glad the book recognized only a few business executives have time or patience to read books from cover to cover. So the opening chapter has short, two page overviews of each of the 8 mega trends. The book also has "thought experiments" to engage readers. For example, what if a maker of coffee machines wants to evolve beyond selling machines to also offer coffee by the cup? What impact does that for financial streams and for sales and customer engagement? Pretty much everything changes when you try to change your business model and adopt the hot trend of "servitization".

The book offers similar opportunities to think about countless vertical applications for their companies which have emerged as a result of COVID, digital transformations, the Ukraine crisis and the climate change urgency.  Most of these are applications that we couldn't have imagined in 2019.

We also discuss new addressable markets in fast-growing emerging economies around the world. We cover the excitement and hype around Generative AI and low-code tools.    

It is nice to have Peter provide commentary in his new role around strategic customer engagements in the office of the CEO. He says amidst all this choice, customers expect very clear guidance from SAP and consistency from its massively expanded ecosystem (in the book, we included perspectives from strategy firms, Industry 4.0 robotics firms, SAP.iO Foundry startups and many others – see details in this post). He hears from customers their highest priority is their customers and their top line. He lists other customer expectations around sustainability, standardization, efficiency (especially in asset intensive sectors), vendor consolidation and related governance.  

Both say the pace of change has definitely accelerated. Peter points to the phenomenal pace of adoption of ChatGPT. He adds “all the more reason to get up early”. Tilman adds we need to acknowledge “what was science fiction yesterday is today's everyday business reality and the constraining factor is business agility”.

It truly is a thrill to have a strategic discussion with these two industry veterans at a vendor with so much industry and global depth. Enjoy this half an hour. So much change – so many new opportunities!!

I will also have a chance to share a session with Peter about the themes from the book at Sapphire in Orlando in a couple of weeks. Details to follow.

SAP BAU excerpts – Ch. 10 – The Road Ahead

As part of the launch of the Business as Unusual book (click on badge on left to get to the Amazon page) by Thomas Saueressig and Peter Maier that we helped conduct interviews and research for, we will share excerpts from each of the 10 chapters/300 pages, and also give you a “behind the scenes” view by sharing snippets of some of the over 100 SAP, customer and partner video interviews that ended up in the book.

Here are some excerpts from the final chapter:

As we close this book, we want to highlight four more megatrends that will continue to change our world. We are looking forward to engaging with our customers and partners in actively shaping our future. (After all, Business as Unusual with SAP is about a forward-looking mindset and ongoing conversations, not a cookbook for using SAP solutions to address today’s and tomorrow’s business priorities.) So we conclude with an outlook on additional megatrends we are observing; we are curious to hear from our readers about your perspectives and points of view:

Metaverse

On Azeroth, the fantasy setting in the Warcraft franchise, our avatars wield swords and lasers in their quests for gimmicks and glory. Online shopping has become second nature for all of us…. Take a quick inventory of the different social media platforms you’re subscribed to. We can expect all these digital islands to mesh up, mash up, and form a parallel universe of business, people, and things.

Artificial intelligence

Perhaps you think the paintings are ugly, the poems weird, the novels bad, the translations error prone, the autonomous cars dangerous, and the conversations stilted, but if you extrapolate the exponential development of the field of artificial intelligence, you might find the future looks both exciting and a bit scary.

Urbanization and future cities

The United Nations has estimated that by 2050, almost 70% of the world population of close to 10 billion people will live in urban areas.[1] You don’t have to wait for this future to arrive to get an idea of the challenges for mayors and urban planners—just look at the biggest cities today.

Networked business and business networks

Important market mechanisms are based on information asymmetry and speed limits for information transmission. The stock markets show us what happens when differential information access for participants is reduced to microseconds. Digital business networks have a great potential for driving efficiencies, creating and disrupting business models, and changing the dynamics between participants.

A twin of this post will include video excerpts from conversations with many of these executives so you can put a face and voice to those in the book.

Business as Unusual

19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is credited with the quote ‘That which does not kill us makes us stronger’. Since then, it has been used by many to inspire resilience and strength during adversity.

In the last few years, that resilience has been repeatedly tested by shock waves from large digital transformations, adapting to climate change, surviving COVID, and now navigating the Ukraine crisis. No industry or country has come through unscathed. Yet, like championship boxers, a breed of executives has learned to bounce back and keep on fighting.

In their dogged persistence, they are helping the world create new energy, new medicine, new mobility, new chemical formulations, new financial instruments, new ecosystems, new customer pathways, new business models.

Thanks to the sponsorship of Thomas Saueressig, Executive  Board member, Product Engineering and Peter Maier, President of Industries and Customer Advisory at SAP, I have been part for the last several weeks of a magical tour of this ‘Business as Unusual’

We have talked to countless executives at SAP, at its customers and its partners. The conversations have covered over 25 industries and 20 countries and involve a changing business vocabulary with concepts like molecular recycling,  green v blue hydrogen, decentralized energy markets, smart insurance, parametric testing in fabs, personalized medicine  and outcome based contracts. The transcripts of the conversations already exceed 2,000 pages.

We are organizing the threads along a series of themes such as Sustainable Energy Transition, Everything as a Service and Future of Capital. You will be hearing lots more about them in the next few weeks.

You already know about S/4HANA and SAP’s cloud products like SuccessFactors. You will get to hear more about products like AIN, BRIM, e-Mobility, Fioneer, GreenToken and many others which are helping with innovation at the edge of enterprises in their labs, their EV fleets, their treasury, their warehouses.  

Importantly you will hear in first-person from many of these ‘boxers’ who keep coming back for more.

Welcome to a New World.