#65: ABAP OSS, Copilots, Boring Leadership
In this issue:
SO MANY COPILOTS
Constellation Research, home of one of my favorite space janitors Holger Mueller, published a prophetic vision: "Disruption is coming for enterprise software". Lots of little tidbits and pointers I vibe with in this piece:
Enterprise software vendors trying to force-feed contract stuffing
Are upgrades worth it? I ask myself this about S/4HANA all the time
Pointing to Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar's position that US companies are hampered by outdated enterprise systems
But as a certified AI dork, I latch onto the pronouncement: "GenAI may be the new UI, but enterprises are trying to sell you copilot silos". I agree with the 'copilot sprawl' prophecy. It feels like every software vendor in the world is offering their own flavor of bot or copilot frameworks that work best with their platform, but could integrate with other enterprise software.
For the most part, chat feels like the natural way to interact with gen AI, and chat means (at the moment) pecking away at your keyboard into text boxes. For creative or meandering exploration, this is the right way to do it. In that mode, you are trying to make your way to a new idea you didn't know was inside you. It makes perfect sense to just flow into a conversation to try to get your idea out of the murky depths of your brain.
But just over the horizon - and happening in a few pockets you can observe right now - agents are making their way in. Where the natural interaction isn't a chat…it's just reviewing what the AI has already done for you. You can tell that you should be in agent-land if your chat interaction feels like "how do I poke the bot to do the one trick I need it to do?" You're not trying to get further down an idea road, you're just trying to knock over the first domino and go home to play video games.
I think chat and agentic modalities will keep gaining massive abilities in the near future. But having 37 different bot windows you need to hunt around to type in your platform-specific prompt into doesn't feel right. PM
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Think, Then Implement: SAP Edition
The Udemy SAP EWM Fundamentals course I took recently ends with an excellent “tips and tricks” video based on the trainer’s experience. One of the tips on how adding a custom field in a wrong place wreaks havoc down the road resonated with me in particular.
Volkswagen ran a funny commercial when they rebranded “sign and drive” event as “sign, THEN drive”. I think many SAP projects are in dire need of “think, then implement”.
The worst offender ought to be the so-called “long text” aka “standard text”, i.e. the place where users can write random notes in many different documents. This text gets dropped into STXH/STXL tables in a special “cluster” field. It’s not possible to search in it and special functions must be called to read the data. Anytime someone later decides this information should be included in business rules or in a report, it’s a surprised Pikachu time. Because now getting this text is a real cluster.
Not to boast but I’ve been able to prevent many of such bad decisions simply because I have experience in explaining this to Pikachus. But how many projects don’t look past the current sprint or one module and just stick data in all the odd places without much thinking? So, fellow SAP practitioners, please: think, THEN implement. At minimum, any time you need to store something, ask where and how it will be used later. JP
Y U NO Embrace Open Source?
When we recently chatted with Paul Hardy, author of ABAP to the Future books, he noted that a lot of interesting “future” stuff these days is in open source. And it’s not just ABAP. In June, SAP Code Connect, the trifecta of SAP tech conferences covering ABAP, UI5, and CAP, had open source at its center.
And why wouldn’t it? Open source is great. You can find a nice utility almost everyone needs but SAP never got around developing. You can peek into someone else’s code (learn from Lars for free!), open a discussion on Clean ABAP, and contribute a few lines for fame and glory.
Sometimes I see developers sneaking in abapGit or ABAP2XLSX even into the environments where open source isn’t strictly forbidden but is also not officially embraced. There is a weird “don’t ask, don’t tell”-esque vibe around it.
I wonder what it would take for the SAP clients to embrace open source warmly. Maybe this recent ABAP namespace initiative will help a bit, who knows. In the meantime, these projects could be a boon for the developers looking to learn and practice. There are many good projects that have been somewhat neglected and/or could use some improvement. For example, I bet if you look at Featuretoggle, you’d immediately see many uses for it. But the comments are all in German, the code is procedural, and UI5 front-end might actually be a deterrent in some cases. Great contribution potential right there. JP
Connect Four (Systems)
Microsoft announced the public preview of an updated SAP OData Connector supporting the OAuth 2 SAML bearer flow. This is the right way to go: an SAP OData connector for Microsoft Power Platform that handles the toughest-but-best way to do single sign-on across APIs, Power Apps, Power BI, and a bajillion Copilot possibilities.
(Note that Bowdark was ahead of its time on this.)
There is SO MUCH need out there in the enterprise for faster development time on apps that use transactional SAP data. I can see the argument for being all in on SAP Build Code and the like if your needs are SAP-only…but as soon as you need to join multiple enterprise applications' data into a single app experience, Power Platform is the best option. Another huge benefit: big SAP shops spend a lot of time and money on managing authorizations. SSO on OData APIs can preserve this investment.
Microsoft and SAP have collaborated a number of times in the past. I'm sort of a cynic when it comes to huge tech companies announcing "partnerships" on the stage of their premiere conferences. Feels like they hardly ever amount to much. But this little feature, surely not part of Satya Nadella or Christian Klein's major quarterly talking points, looks like the result of teams who actually care about listening to customers. PM
Boring Leadership
This is one of the “non-technical” stories I manage to sneak into the Nerdletter once in a while. There was an overused trope in Soviet newsletters about Soviet people “heroically overcoming difficulties”. But everyone knew many of such difficulties were self-inflicted, sometimes caused by those same “heroes”.
There is nothing heroic in foreseeing difficulties and avoiding them. Good leadership should be boring, and we should celebrate foresight more than solving preventable problems. Ironically, foresight is rarely valued in IT. As the joke goes, when something bad happens, then it’s “what are we paying you for?” and when nothing is happening, it’s “what are we paying you for?”
As the video explains, “we see leadership potential in people who speak more, regardless of what they say”. Perhaps we should pay more attention. JP
P.S. There is a hilarious video How to sound smart in your TEDx Talk. I didn’t find a way to weave it in the story but it’s too good not to mention.
Hooray, I Got Automated
From Acceleration Economy's Bob Evans: "SAP expects to slash $100 million this year by automating internal processes with Business AI". I'm of two minds when I hear news like this.
My eager nerd mind lights up with super cool possibilities to automate what never could have been automated before. Between plain ol' boring AI and hyped-to-the-moon GENERATIVE AI, it appears that enterprises are finding uses that impact operations. (And I can personally vouch for the truth of that!) It bolsters my hopeful, outlandish sci-fi fantasies of everyone getting relief from stupid mundane BS at work.
But every time this comes up, there's an expected body count. I've noted a few times in this newsletter cases where AI has a real (or expected) staff attrition footnote. This one's no different. Evans notes that "the business outcome, Klein said, is that far fewer people are needed for mundane tasks such as compliance checks and document checks".
I often hear the perspective that AI automation will free up employees to do higher-value tasks. Sometimes that will be true. But I think executives view many departments as nothing but expensive cost centers. There is no way those departments will get the optimistic take. The future doesn't feel great when it pushes you to the side. PM
Watch the Nerdletter Talk 65 video for our discussion on these stories!
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$100 million blah blah…it’s Bob. It’s schlock…moving on.