In this issue: The Great Clean Core Chase - Functional Jedi Masters - The Round Tables of ABAP - Jokers To The Right - Steampunkification - S/4HANA Cloud Safekeeper
I find a lot of the talk around clean core to be a little amusing. Back at Procter and Gamble in the early 2000s we were already rolling out R/3 based on a global standard template with a minimal developments mindset. For me, clean core is just a buzzword. The real point is 'manage your apps propertly'. I don't think there's anything wrong with developing in the core as long as you have good development standards and good tracking. Most companies are only struggling because of poor undocumented programs and tables all over the place. Lately, I've been thinking that a lot of organisations are blindly running into what I'd call 'fat cloud'.. they might have a clean core, but they are going to end up with an unmanageble list of APIs, interfaces and add ons all doing slight variations of the same thing. I think we need a rational approach to core and cloud.
The real underlying issue is the lack of power of IT senior leadership and enterprise architects to control development. Most organisations are no where near fixing this. For example, the head of customer services still has his own budget to go and buy his own SAAS and hire some unnoficial IT people to work on random integrations.
All the people on LinkedIn complaining about the S/4HANA upgrade being too hard, and too expensive. It's really their own fault, they haven't managed their existing app or budgeted and planned for periodic updates. If I was a CIO I'd have a solid set of upgrades marked out every 5 years or so, so that I never get to the point where I have a 20 year old system that's going to be a nightmare to updgrade.
SAP BTP ABAP Environment Roundtable = facepalm.
I think SAP has always been awful at naming, and as the portfolio of solutions continues to grow it just gets worse. I was just writing a blog about building an integration flow the other day, and I find myself needing to label a box on a diagram as "SAP cloud - business technology platform - integration suite', or should I be nesting those boxes inside each other?
I even think S/4HANA Cloud Public, S/4HANA Cloud Private, and S/4HANA On-Premise is terrible naming. For a start most large organisations are not on-premise, the data centre, hosting, infrastruture is outsourced (HP etc. or more modern Azure etc.). 'Private vs. Public' is also poor, public feels like a 'shared system'. I'd want to see SAP simplify the naming and just call it S/4HANA, then specify deployment options, but in a way that better describes what the customer gets. Public should be named in a way that it's clear innovation goes there first. On-premise should be named in a way that it's clear you get full control.
I like "Happy ABAP fun times". Seriously though, why not just call it "ABAP dev" or something, that would appeal to younger developers. I need to check out those past recordings, I wasn't aware of it either.
My take on AI is it fixes the broken 'web search'. Just the other day working on testing an integration flow I wasn't quite sure how Apache Camel syntax works. I tried reading the documentation, very hard to understand, I tried google search, nothing. I then carefully worded what I was specifically trying to do in Chat GPT and it immediately gave me exactly the right syntax and was able to explain how it breaks down. I like using Chat GPT like this. I never let it write code for me, but when I'm stuck I find that it's a faster 'learning tool' than other traditional methods. I do however worry, that this is affecting my longer term critical thinking and 'research' capability.
Thanks for a very thoughtful comment! I feel like many complaints around upgrades and clean core sound like "we tried absolutely nothing and we are all out of options". Many years ago I've inherited 2 systems full of poorly organized and managed ABAP code. There wasn't even the whole lot of code, it was just a tangled mess. There was no development leadership and the system was given off to assorted consultants. It wasn't easy to sort it out but eventually, I did. A lot of it was simple renaming, adding simple documentation, extracting shared functionality and getting rid of junk. I was ahead of time with "Run simple" :)
I find a lot of the talk around clean core to be a little amusing. Back at Procter and Gamble in the early 2000s we were already rolling out R/3 based on a global standard template with a minimal developments mindset. For me, clean core is just a buzzword. The real point is 'manage your apps propertly'. I don't think there's anything wrong with developing in the core as long as you have good development standards and good tracking. Most companies are only struggling because of poor undocumented programs and tables all over the place. Lately, I've been thinking that a lot of organisations are blindly running into what I'd call 'fat cloud'.. they might have a clean core, but they are going to end up with an unmanageble list of APIs, interfaces and add ons all doing slight variations of the same thing. I think we need a rational approach to core and cloud.
The real underlying issue is the lack of power of IT senior leadership and enterprise architects to control development. Most organisations are no where near fixing this. For example, the head of customer services still has his own budget to go and buy his own SAAS and hire some unnoficial IT people to work on random integrations.
All the people on LinkedIn complaining about the S/4HANA upgrade being too hard, and too expensive. It's really their own fault, they haven't managed their existing app or budgeted and planned for periodic updates. If I was a CIO I'd have a solid set of upgrades marked out every 5 years or so, so that I never get to the point where I have a 20 year old system that's going to be a nightmare to updgrade.
SAP BTP ABAP Environment Roundtable = facepalm.
I think SAP has always been awful at naming, and as the portfolio of solutions continues to grow it just gets worse. I was just writing a blog about building an integration flow the other day, and I find myself needing to label a box on a diagram as "SAP cloud - business technology platform - integration suite', or should I be nesting those boxes inside each other?
I even think S/4HANA Cloud Public, S/4HANA Cloud Private, and S/4HANA On-Premise is terrible naming. For a start most large organisations are not on-premise, the data centre, hosting, infrastruture is outsourced (HP etc. or more modern Azure etc.). 'Private vs. Public' is also poor, public feels like a 'shared system'. I'd want to see SAP simplify the naming and just call it S/4HANA, then specify deployment options, but in a way that better describes what the customer gets. Public should be named in a way that it's clear innovation goes there first. On-premise should be named in a way that it's clear you get full control.
I like "Happy ABAP fun times". Seriously though, why not just call it "ABAP dev" or something, that would appeal to younger developers. I need to check out those past recordings, I wasn't aware of it either.
My take on AI is it fixes the broken 'web search'. Just the other day working on testing an integration flow I wasn't quite sure how Apache Camel syntax works. I tried reading the documentation, very hard to understand, I tried google search, nothing. I then carefully worded what I was specifically trying to do in Chat GPT and it immediately gave me exactly the right syntax and was able to explain how it breaks down. I like using Chat GPT like this. I never let it write code for me, but when I'm stuck I find that it's a faster 'learning tool' than other traditional methods. I do however worry, that this is affecting my longer term critical thinking and 'research' capability.
Great newsletter!
Thanks for a very thoughtful comment! I feel like many complaints around upgrades and clean core sound like "we tried absolutely nothing and we are all out of options". Many years ago I've inherited 2 systems full of poorly organized and managed ABAP code. There wasn't even the whole lot of code, it was just a tangled mess. There was no development leadership and the system was given off to assorted consultants. It wasn't easy to sort it out but eventually, I did. A lot of it was simple renaming, adding simple documentation, extracting shared functionality and getting rid of junk. I was ahead of time with "Run simple" :)