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 [...]

Phase 6 RUN SAP ASAP Methodology

By |March 26th, 2012|

Anyone who has been around SAP for any period of time is reasonably familiar with the SAP ASAP Methodology.  In fact I rarely see sales presentation materials from many system integrators which do not at least mention it.  Even some of the bigger integrators with custom methodologies may reference it in passing and show the SAP Implementation Roadmap to demonstrate how their methodology has some similarity to it, or supplements some of the few gaps that may remain.  In a prev [...]

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 [...]

SAP Enabled Business Transformation for IT Leadership

By |March 12th, 2012|

Continuing the Journey to the Business-Converged SAP Center of Excellence After many years researching and living through IT and business convergence for IT leadership, I ran into a study that brought more clarity to the key dividing concepts. Some interesting approaches and maturity models are available for senior executives, but little direction for the delivery organization (for detailed development, see 3 Development Phases for SAP Center of Excellence Maturity). CIO magazine established a [...]

The PERFECT SAP Acquisition Target

By |March 5th, 2012|

Recently SAP acquired Success Factors to supplement their SAP HR with talent acquisition as well as make a serious play in the cloud computing space.  And although the leaders in Waldorf generally tend to rely heavily on organic development and growth there are times when acquisitions obviously make sense.  I believe I have the perfect acquisition for them to consider!  That acquisition would be a scrappy CRM outfit that has been going directly after Sales Force and having a lot o [...]

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 [...]