#69: Joule, DSAG, Flight Recorders, CodeConcise

In this issue:

• You Can Do It (Even in ECC)

• DSAG Still Loves The Classics

• Is AI The Next Thing SAP Will Abandon?

• SAP Project Flight Recorder

• Developer Productivity Strikes Again

• AI Legacy Spelunking

You Can Do It (Even in ECC)

For the last few years, the vibe in the less cutting-edgy part of SAP world has been an odd mix of FOMO and despair. You don’t have access to the latest “Cloud with 25% more AI” products, so might as well crawl under the blankets and take a nap till 2027.

Well, time to wake the f*k up. Do you know that your rusty but trusty ECC system can serve as a back-end to many exciting applications? How? Simple: OData services.

SAP Gateway (aka the best thing since sliced bread in SAP) was first introduced with SAP NetWeaver 7.02 in 2011. Yes, 2011, you read that right. Unless your ECC system is older than that (condolences), start reading the older blog posts about SEGW transaction, like this one from Andre Fischer. And when you create your first OData service, what can you do with it? Pretty much anything!

Would your customer service kill for a simple website for customers or vendors to check on their orders and invoices? Take your OData service with information from ECC and slap a front-end of choice on top of it. Assistant bot? You got it. Everyone and their brother (Microsoft, UiPath) offers some bot platform these days. Grab the one you like and connect to your OData service. Boom, magic! And did you know you could use SAP BTP with ECC? Yes.

Sure, OData development is quite different in S/4HANA. But there is no reason to just sit and wait. If anything, learning code-based approach first is beneficial because it helps you understand what exactly happens with each request. And you will appreciate the convenience of CDS views even more. Right now though, just go ahead and do it. Because you can. JP

DSAG Still Loves The Classics

Lindsay Clark points out a DSAG research report (I didn't see a link to the report itself) about innovation and SAP. DSAG has called for AI features that get integrated into S/4HANA private cloud edition to be made available on-prem. If I was writing license checks to SAP the size that most companies do, I would also be furious. 

I don't envy SAP. Honestly, how in the hell would SAP be able to keep up with all of the on-prem instances, each a special snowflake, in a tech environment like the one we live in? I think the root cause of this brouhaha is the seismic aftershocks of how tech vendors fell in love with generative AI post-ChatGPT. SAP's promise in 2020 to support S/4HANA until 2040 was made without knowing that.

Another tidbit caught my attention: "only 11 percent of respondents can easily match the pace of change" in technological, social, and economic advances. You might read "only" in that quote as indicating a small number. When I think about most businesses and most advances in tech, it feels like 11 percent is actually a huge number. Who are these magical 11 percent of CIOs and tech managers who are able to match the pace of change of technology? What manner of superpowers do they have? Were they bitten by a radioactive spider who also happened to be an SAP expert? PM

Is AI The Next Thing SAP Will Abandon?

Only two things are certain in SAP world: regular product renaming and abandoning the technologies or projects that were supposedly the big deal. Notable examples of the latter are Enterprise Services (as overheard in a TechEd corridor chat, “SAP laid down the pipes but forgot to fill them with the content”) and SAP Leonardo.

There is also a myriad of smaller items. For example, one would think that SAP Fiori, the flagship UI solution for the XXI century should be getting much love. And it’s true in some areas. But for example, after developing a package of basic Fiori apps for Master Data Governance (MDG) around 2014, there hasn’t been much done. And if that package delivered the apps for every customer’s wildest master data dreams, it would be fair to hang a “mission accomplished” banner. But check this out: there is an app to request a customer data change but no app to request a supplier change. And they’re both a “business partner”! What’s up with that?

Of course, AI is the king these days. We’ve been told SAP Joule is “the new UI”, so Fiori who? Let me dust off my crystal ball to see whether Joule will get “the Leonardo treatment” or what next big thing SAP will chase leaving behind a warehouse of half-baked AI bots. JP

SAP Project Flight Recorder

Failed SAP projects feel like aviation disasters. “Oh, the humanity!” is an appropriate exclamation. Carsten Leschke writes: "what if we took a page from [the FAA]'s book and applied it to failed SAP projects?", putting forward an approach to monitoring, reporting, and practicing to learn from project failure.

Some great suggestions! 

• No finger-pointing allowed. Teams that I work on that embrace this are the best ones. 

• Get your data together. Make a "black box" with ALL the possible relevant project-level info that could be relevant for crash review, and then create consistent reporting around that data.

• Practice makes perfect. Hey, maybe try out a fun game like Dominik Panzer presented?

I foresee some challenges in making true failure learnings real. And just like the above are all essentially human behavior-driven, so are the challenges. The biggest thing that pops to mind is that when projects crash and burn, everyone's attention is focused on making sure the business can still work. Trying to compile reports and do post-mortems will always wait until the fires are put out…and often once the fires die, so does the will to do anything further. People will wander away (or be forced out, if they're consultants). 

Maybe the analogy breaks down because often it won't be outside investigators cleaning up the crash. It'll be the crash victims (SAP project staff) themselves. PM

Developer Productivity Strikes Again

You might remember the preposterous 2023 McKinsey developer productivity study. This subject is making a comeback and, naturally, now AI is also involved.

In his recent newsletter, Frank Scavo brought receipts to talk about GenAI role in developer productivity. The numbers are fuzzy, and opinions are somewhat divided. Just like quoted in the newsletter, this youtuber also talks about why they don’t use Copilot anymore. It may sound like a weird flex but “all your fun are belong to us” expresses the sentiment quite well.

The managers or shareholders do not think in terms of “fun” though. This slide from recent NDC presentation shows exactly what’s on their mind: “Could we get by with paying less?”

Regardless of actual productivity measurements, the typical money saving move is to lay off more experienced and therefore more expensive developers. (Rampant ageism in software industry is not a secret.) While the most productive developer in the team is not the one with most commits but the one who encourages others to do better. And it’s something no GenAI would replace. JP

AI Legacy Spelunking

I've been thinking about "legacy" lately. (Stay tuned for an upcoming article on that! Here's our previous column.) In my world, it comes up most often as an old enterprise system, about to be steamrolled by S/4HANA or another $HUGE_NEW_THING. The folks at Thoughtworks have been tackling this, too - only in a way more systematic and awesome way. 

Check out CodeConcise. It's their approach to "applying GenAI for Modernization". It's got some great notes about using abstract syntax trees and knowledge graphs to give an AI system useful knowledge of a legacy system targeted for modernization.

The need for approaches like CodeConcise is due to the problems that make modernization expensive. I can relate to them, especially "how can we gather knowledge about it without having a human expert available?" There are stories and decisions buried inside the systems themselves that escape documentation and become untouchable mysteries. 

This approach has the hallmark of the most powerful uses of AI today: the language model can do amazing things, but a human who cares and provides guidance is still the most important part. By a long shot. PM

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