#56 SAP Certifications, AI Again, RTO, SAP Open Source

In this issue:

• SAP Certification: WIIFM

• Sponsor: Nuve

• AI Transforms Transformations

• No Hello, Please

• GTFO With This RTO

• Tech Is Lying To You

• The SAP Open-Source Deep Cuts

SAP Certification: WIIFM?

Many questions are floating around on the interwebs about the value of SAP certification. Is it worth it? Should I get one? Will it help me to find a job?

This subject merits a longer post that I might write eventually, but today I want to address some popular questions and misconceptions.

1. SAP certification is meant for SAP professionals: developers, functional consultants, etc. There is no certification for business users, i.e. people who are doing business activities in SAP systems. If you see a job ad for, say, a CSR or Business Analyst position that mentions “SAP knowledge”, there is no certificate to help you gain advantage. (To be honest, I suspect those job ads mostly mean “candidate has seen the horrors of SAP GUI and won’t be complaining about it”.)

2. You cannot buy your way into a job by acquiring SAP certification. Advantages of having SAP certificate on the open job market are somewhat dubious and practical experience is valued higher.

3. There is a new case where SAP certification may be beneficial: Enterprise Architects. It is a somewhat emerging and also very important profession in SAP world. Just last year, SAP started offering EA certification, which is a good move because EA can attract wrong people who think architects just draw diagrams and rake in money. This can be incredibly dangerous.

As bonus content, I present to you vintage (2008!) blog post Is SAP Certification Worth the Money? by none other than Jon Reed from his pre-diginomica days. Just like many things in SAP, not a lot changed since then. JP

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AI Transforms Transformations

No caption needed. Except this caption explaining that no caption is needed.

I thoroughly enjoy diginomica's Jon Reed dropping AI hotness on the regular. Check out his latest SAP AI strategy piece. He writes about his conversations with Dr. Philipp Herzig, SAP's Chief AI Officer, and gets appropriately hot takes from Josh Greenbaum and Geoff Scott on all this SAP AI stuff impacting customers. Cloud, RISE, S/4 transformations…and other great SAP topics du jour. 

Jon prods me to a few further thoughts:

• Data is huge. SO huge. And huge in SO many ways. If you're good at Microsoft's Fabric or SAP's Datasphere (among others), you will put food on the table for a long time. 

  • Everyone seems to be talking about training data for AI in the 'traditional' machine-learning sense: to do specialized vision tasks for predictive analytics. This is good, of course. 

  • But holy cow - the uplift when you think about the semantics of your data, and how you can use those semantics in providing large language model-based experiences to employees and customers. Get data smart about that stuff, and you will go to the moon. Human creativity, fully unleashed. 

• Data also isn't huge. For many use cases of generative AI, you just need a tool that can help you express yourself more clearly, or investigate the inner bits of a random thought. This is unbelievably powerful but surprisingly difficult to communicate.

Jon's wrap-up includes this thought: "It's an interesting juxtaposition between SAP's emphasis on cloud-based AI - up against points Scott and Greenbaum made about using AI to actually get to the cloud in the first place." Jon has the perspective to say they're not actually in conflict, and I couldn't agree more. AI is so much more general-purpose - to think you can only use it if you do certain cloudy things dictated by one vendor is just…monumentally wrong-headed. The sky's the limit.

By the way, next time you're at diginomica.com, notice that it's installable as a progressive web app. Neat. PM

No Hello, Please

No, folks, I haven’t gone mad to suggest we do away with common courtesy. But as No Hello website puts it with the typical Internet-age brevity, if you’re going to just type in “hello” and send it to anyone, maybe reconsider?

What also fits in the same category is the questions on SAP Community like “Does anyone know SD?”. I’m sure someone does. And my favorite, “is this still available?” when you’re trying to sell or even give away something online. There is about 99% probability that after you reply “yes” to any of those, you’ll never hear from the other person again. (Which always makes me wonder: what happens to those people? Are alien abductions real, after all? Someone should look into this.)

There is some element of “cultural differences”: one culture’s efficiency is another one’s rudeness. A few years ago, I exchanged some emails with a gentleman from Middle East who found me online and had an SAP question. While his ornate greetings were rather annoying to me (“just get to the point, bro!”), my brief replies probably seemed ill-mannered to him.

Ironically, sending a “naked hello” is especially inefficient when the recipient is many time zones away. There is a good middle-ground, I think: include as elaborate greeting as you wish but also state your request or question before smashing that Send button. JP

GTFO With This RTO

A billion years removed from COVID times, Return To Office (RTO) still pops up in headlines. There's a recent piece at Inc. proclaiming the death of RTO. We have Information Week calling cubicle farms "breeding grounds for interruptions, and interruptions are the bane of developer productivity". On the flip side are Google, Amazon, Bank of America, and others pulling hard on people to come back. The latest from Dell is to tell remote workers that they're not eligible for promotions.

Someone please educate me on why RTO is such a big screaming deal to some companies. 

• Is there evidence that it increases productivity? Almost every piece I've read on the subject indicates otherwise. 

• Do some work environments require in-person contact? The pandemic proved that for knowledge workers, firing up a Teams meeting to collaborate and then diving back into your focus area is a viable path to productivity. 

• Do they want people to work fewer hours? Sitting in a car for an hour just to plunk down in a cubicle, put on my headphones, and join a remote meeting is the exact opposite of productivity. I could have finished up some other administrative task from my home office instead of trying to find a freaking parking spot. 

I'm a person who enjoys being around others at work. I can say with certainty that if I'd started my career around COVID times, I wouldn't have had some formative experiences that I got earlier. But I figured out how to make remote work work. My life is better for it. Dell and other RTO-focused companies are missing the boat, and should reverse their RTO policies. PM

Tech is Lying to You

My phone has always been highly sus with its unreliable battery power info and random vibrations. Finally, my suspicion that technology has been lying to us has been confirmed.

Despite click-baitey title, this video has some interesting trivia (why are keyboard keys not in alphabetical order?), Bouba and Kiki, and plenty of food for thought on what else might we not know about the tech around us.

I think enterprise software goodness is especially prone to be “missing an affordance”, i.e. users don’t have a good way of knowing what’s available. True story from one of my old jobs. We received a request to create a new ABAP report. Nothing unusual about the request except… a report exactly like that has already been created and available in production for several months. But something happened (or didn’t happen?) that caused the potential users to have no clue it existed. Probably something similar to why I’m missing out on my iPhone’s potentially awesome features: didn’t get a memo from Apple. JP

The SAP Open-Source Deep Cuts

I got a hankerin’ to find wacky, weird, cool things I hadn’t seen before, so I sorted the SAP public GitHub repository list by GitHub stars, ascending. Here are a few projects that caught my eye.

• Cloud Robotics - I am ashamed to admit I didn’t even realize SAP was anywhere in the robotics game. Look further at Warehouse Robotics for EWM.

• Emobility Smart Charging - Why is this in the SAP public repositories? I love it. Maybe it’s embedded in a larger suite.

• Power Monitor - Monitoring tool for macOS device power consumption. I don’t know where it fits, but it could be plugged into the larger set of sustainability/green ledger initiatives.

• Project Foxhound - A fork of Firefox aimed at a particular kind of security testing. Check out the paper the authors cite.

• pyodata - Python OData Client. With the numerous ways I’ve wrangled OData into various nooks and crannies of applications, I can’t believe I’ve never come across this one before.

Go take a look! Find something interesting that a fellow nerd offered to the world. PM

• Don’t miss new episode of The Boring Enterprise Nerdcast! We chat with ASUG CEO Geoff Scott on a wide range of AI, SAP, and IT topics.

• Catch our latest Nerd Exchange column Can't We All Just Get Along? in First Five where we share some IT and business war stories.

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