#48 Dreamforce, SAP Pricing, McKinsey, Amazon

Boo!

All Hallows’ Eve is around the corner. In this hair-raising, bone-chilling issue, we’ve brewed up a cauldron of devilishly delightful content. So grab your broomsticks, dust off your capes, and get ready for a wicked good time!

-Jelena and Paul, The Ghosts-in-Chief

Dreamforce for Non-AI Dorks

Basically a direct line into Marc Benioff’s brain

I went and did a count: for Salesforce's Dreamforce conference in 2022, about 5 out of 107 available video sessions made some mention of AI. For 2023, at least 95 of 120 sessions mentioned AI in some way. Of course, this huge shift made sense with its billing as "The largest AI event of the year."

Regular readers have probably gleaned my fascination with AI, but this stark contrast made me wonder: Salesforce and its most interesting acquisitions, Slack and Tableau, aren't just AI, so what non-AI things were discussed? Here some non-AI sessions that caught my eye. 

• Meet the Salesforce Starter Suite: "What we've heard from our customers is that they want a simple way to start out." 

• Working with McLaren F1 on fan engagement: McLaren Racing CEO calls out how Salesforce is really helping them to learn from their connection with fans. Also an interesting tidbit I didn't know: F1 is the biggest sport in the world on an annual basis (consider that World Cup and Olympics are not annual events). 

• Slack roadmap: They're trying out a new branding phrase, "Intelligent Productivity Platform" (IPP). Calling this presentation out is sort of a cheat, as upon watching it there are AI bits inside. But it's not ALL AI. Slack is continuing to morph into a Salesforce UI, especially things like bulk updating of Salesforce data. I suppose that's to be expected, but as an early-ish Slack person, I feel a little bit of remorse for the fun, simple experience of just chatting with people. 

The perfect counter to my nerd tendency to focus on AI is to give me customer stories like the McLaren thing. An example of a real business doing a real thing continues to be the most effective way to communicate your message. PM

The Most Balanced Piece About Developer Productivity

If I were to create a word cloud from all the um… feedback McKinsey piece on measuring developer productivity received from the actual developers, it would be split between “absurd” and “nonsense”.

Everybody who’s anybody dragged the article over the digital coals. “It’s rubbish”, tweeted Grady Booch. Dave Farley said “NONSENSE”. Gergely Orosz was a bit more diplomatic:

The thinking that’s evident in the article is absurdly naive and ignores the dynamics of high-performing software engineering teams.

Kent Beck posted:

McKinsey's [article] is like if we measured surgeon productivity on what percentage of their time they were cutting with a scalpel or stitching with a needle and we ignored whether the patient got better.

And Hacker News delivered the knock-out punch:

It's easy to measure manager productivity. They create nothing and are the least productive people in an organization.

Hear hear. I’ve seen my share of wacky productivity measurements: lines of code, number of objects created or updated... The dumbest and most vile of them all is the number of tickets handled or bugs resolved. Need more tickets? Create more problems and then heroically solve them. Need fewer? Swipe everything under the carpet. Or argue endlessly whether this is a bug or a new requirement. Ugh.

This recent piece by Dan Terhorst-North offers the most balanced review of McKinsey's original. Starting with questioning the premise and ending with specific suggestions. His thought “I guess a lot of this comes down to one’s motivation for individual assessment in the first place” resonates with my personal experience and what I wrote before in a story about DORA. If “performance measurement” is used to assign blame instead of helping developers thrive, then it presents a fundamental problem that even McKinsey won’t solve for you. JP

Surveying a Survey on AI Ops

I don't know why I'm addicted to these vendor-sponsored survey things. They strike me as rather unscientific. Though if I'm being fair, they don't claim to be scientific. So…I guess that's OK? This time it's Digitate conducting one in partnership with ASUG, on SAP system downtime and operational automation. 

A few findings that I can comment on: 

• 66% of respondents say up to a quarter of their time is fighting unplanned issues that cause SAP downtime. That gives me two gut reactions: one, it completely sucks to spend so much time on that; and two, it's a miracle straight from the heavens that a system as complicated as SAP and its attendant integrations works at all. 

• 39% reported downtimes that affected customers. I'm shocked that it's that low. 

• Respondents reported using up to 20 monitoring tools for their SAP systems. I was initially dumbfounded until I thought through all the things that talk to each other. That number probably grows in relation to system size and integration complexity. 

The sales pitch here is ignio AI.ERPOps (bearing a nomenclature resemblance to Avantra's AIOps platform). AI.ERPOps says it's an "AI-based insight driven product for autonomous SAP operations," and I note supply chain, Basis, IDoc, and security automation as key pieces. 

In former jobs, I've played ops roles for smaller non-SAP systems, and those were a nightmare. If there are any Basis administrator-type readers, you have my respect and sympathy. Prod your budgetary purse-string-holders to get you better tools. PM

Devtoberfest 2023: Season Finale

Now that the whole season of this exciting show is available for streaming (see the convenient calendar view), there are more highlights to recommend.  

• How to Clean your ABAP code in Seconds with ABAP Cleaner session was one of the most popular ones and for a good reason. It’s something that is immediately useful to everyone and I can’t wait to spend more time with this tool.

• Explore ABAP Profiling with the ABAP Development Tools – I feel like we’ve clearly reached The Golden Age of ABAP tools. What a time to be alive!

• What’s New in the ABAP RESTful Application Programming Model (RAP)? Very useful overview that was exactly what the title said. I found new event functionality a bit confusing but it might be easier to use than to explain.

• There was an abundance of the sessions that had something to do with events and event-driven architecture (EDA). I liked Combine event driven programming and EDA with SAP S/4HANA and Advanced Event Mesh for its clear and concise no-bs presentation. If you only have time for one EDA session, this is the one I’d recommend.

• If you are into S/4HANA migration or ABAP cloud readiness subject, Custom Code Adaptation to SAP S/4HANA and ABAP Cloud session was seriously the best one I’ve seen so far. Really well done.

Also, see this story for my faves from week 1. I bet there were many other great sessions that I just had no time to watch. Share your favorites in the comments! JP

Hey Bot, What’s Your Price?

Peter Sayer covers pricing strategy for SAP's Premium Plus, including the current champion of headline-grabbing: generative AI capabilities. The title of the piece captures the feeling I got: "SAP’s new generative AI pricing: Neither transparent nor explainable yet". 

There's mention of a pricing strategy around the most powerful but complex AI features: "AI units". You will be able to get a certain amount under the base Premium Plus plan, and then you'll have to pay for more use. At some point, you're going to have to think about these "AI units" as something approaching hiring dollars: you know that the thing is useful and can be applied to all sorts of tasks, but you have to pay it enough to feed it (in this case, feed the hungry GPUs their delicious electrons). 

The challenge is that (for the moment) the AI units are not as generally capable as real humans. If you're going to use the genAI services, you need to have a plan for how you're going to spend those dollars. If you're going to create a plan, you need a very detailed breakdown of the things you expect the AI features to accomplish. That is sorely lacking (and not just on SAP's part). Forget for the moment the data/risk/privacy concerns - in the real world, I see a HUGE disparity between folks who understand how to get the most of genAI tools and those who don't. To make that AI unit spending plan, you need to get anyone interacting with the AI onto the right side of that equation. 

My hand-wringing might be premature. The AI unit pricing isn't ready to be released yet. But when it's ready to go, my feedback to SAP is to go overboard on specificity and make detailed communication plans for these features. Understanding the service will be just as big a hurdle for your customers as creating it was for you. PM

Amazon: Delivering The Future for Realz

When I heard that Amazon had some Delivering The Future announcement, my first reaction was an eye-rolling “OK, let’s take a look what this evil corporation came up with”. But turns out there is actual innovation going on at Evil Inc.  

• Drone deliveries are real and coming to more states and countries (folks in Italy and UK, let us know how it goes). I saw a comment on Reddit that drone deliveries will soon become mainstream and homes will have special “chimneys” where the drones will deliver packages like Santa Claus. It’s not the flying cars we promised but still.

• Amazon already revealed their plan to produce new robot overlords last year. And this didn’t just fizzle, they now claim to have 750,000 robots in productive use with more models to come.

• As a car owner, I’m intrigued by their automated vehicle inspection thingy that looks like a car wash. If we had something like that for humans too, that would be dope!

Oh, and did I mention Prime Air is also the thing? Amazon-branded remake of Cast Away is coming to the theatres near you! JP

• Watch the corresponding Nerdletter Talk discussion for bonus content!

• Don’t miss our presentation and roundtable discussion at ASUG Tech Connect November 7-9.

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