Will SAP HANA Lead to a Big Data Revolution?

By |December 17th, 2012|

Many people focus on HANA as a competitor to Oracle, and it is. Even if HANA adoption and sales were to completely devastate SAP's biggest competitor (Oracle), that would not be HANA's biggest impact. The HANA product has the potential to disrupt entire industries in the context of Big Data. Unlike Big Data, I have been skeptical about the benefits and use of social media in the enterprise, writing about it in Why Social Media Marketing Success Is Elusive for Business and Social Media Fads and [...]

Creating a Knowledge-Centered Learning Organization

By |April 16th, 2012|

This post is a continuation of Business Transformation for IT Leadership and is part of a journey around Organizational Change Management Inside the IT Support Organization. To achieve an active, vibrant, knowledge-sharing learning organization, you need some baseline understanding of what your goals are. You need a culture that produces, organizes, disseminates, applies, and then refines information (see the image to the left). This leads me to the next key point that few people who call thems [...]

Organizational Change Management Inside the SAP IT Support Organization

By |April 2nd, 2012|

The last few weeks have focused on the path for IT leaders to become strategic business partners. Academic research shows that to gain Sustained Business Value from SAP Business Software, you must focus technology implementation efforts on business benefits. This includes using metrics to determine if business goals were achieved by the software implementation effort. Achieving Business Value from SAP Investment was about case studies that evaluated organizations with a business benefits approa [...]

How To Navigate the SAP Business Transformation Journey

By |March 19th, 2012|

One driver for this continuing Series on SAP Competency Center or SAP Center of Excellence is the desire for so many senior IT leaders to become future-state business strategist CIOs. The last post provided the introduction of SAP Enabled Business Transformation for IT Leadership, a key requirement for senior IT leaders to become strategic business peers. Additionally, that post introduced the three key milestones on the journey to the future-state business strategist IT leader-- especially if [...]

Achieving Business Value from SAP Investment

By |February 27th, 2012|

As a follow-up to the previous post on Sustained Business Value from SAP Business Software, I did some research on the study authors and discovered their continued focus on this issue. Recently, Peppard (one of the authors) and a couple of other colleagues provided real business value success findings in an upcoming journal article titled “Factors Affecting the Successful Realization of Benefits from Systems Development Projects: Findings From Three Case Studies” [FN1]. While I read through and [...]

ERP II & ERP III – SAP Business IT Revolution

By |October 31st, 2011|

The day after I released my last post (SAP IT Governance – Achieve Business IT Engagement), techrepublic.com published a review of the CIO future direction. While I do not agree with all of the Gartner conclusions they published, I certainly agree with the “new CIO manifesto” (TechRepublic: Get drastic: 15 IT best practices to kill). Reading through the comments left on the TechRepublic post was enlightening. However, most of the comments focused on the details of one or two points of disagreem [...]