The Boring Enterprise Nerdletter #13: Upskilling, ServiceNow, Composable ERP, Process Mining, ABAP
Hi there,
When we started this Nerdletter last year, we made a simple commitment to you and to ourselves: biweekly, 6 stories, never dull.
And as this issue totally coincidentally comes out on the nerdiest day of all, it seems that consistency and determination pay off, after all. So we wish you to stay consistently curious and determined in learning.
So ignite those lightsabers, warm up those hyperdrives, and see if you can't use the Force a little bit. You've always known you were a Jedi. May the 4th be with you!
-Jelena and Paul
Upskilling on Cloud In One Hour or Less
In our previous stories and conversations about SAP developer learning, two questions came up consistently: what to learn exactly and where to find time?
SAP technologies are going in so many directions, there is so much content, and at the end of the day, developers want to go home too. “Standard” learning recommendations of openSAP courses or developer tutorials are great but can consume hours and days. And telling someone to learn “cloud” is like suggesting learning Math or Physics: cute idea but not exactly helpful because it’s such a broad subject.
When it comes to Cloud, this 13-minute video from Fireship YT channel could be your best time investment. It's dated 2020 but it's still valid and offers an excellent explanation of the foundational concepts. If you want to dig in a bit more, then my top choice for general Cloud knowledge is IBM learning. The UI is crisp, articles well-written, and content organization makes sense.
In SAP world, we need to become familiar with Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP). SAP folks couldn’t keep it short if their life depended on it, so you won’t find great 10-minute videos just yet. The best bet for CAP is this recent 1-hour recording of SAP Community call.
Start with these little investments and expand your learning portfolio if and when you need it. JP
ServiceNow Crushing It With Bill At The Helm
ServiceNow makes me think of helpdesks and ITSM processes. These days it's more than that, including things like supply chain, workflows, Environmental Social and Governance (ESG), employee and customer experience, among others.
At diginomica, Derek du Preez writes about ServiceNow's Q1 '22 results, and if you're a shareholder there are a number of things to inch you closer to that second yacht:
26% year-over-year growth in subscription revenue
27% year-over-year growth in total revenue
Lots of things to key off in du Preez's report, but I'm keeping my eye on ServiceNow's low-code application development platform, with two pieces: App Engine and Integration Hub. Low-code and fast application development continue to pop up all over the place in our stories around here - ServiceNow's CEO calls out low-code as a huge opportunity: "IDC now forecasted 750 million net new applications will be created between 2023 and 2025." That number is gobsmacking, and puts in perspective why all the big business software players seem to be trying to find ways to stitch low-code platforms into their solutions.
For SAP junkies like us Boring Enterprise Nerds, we can't help but notice that former SAP CEO Bill McDermott is now the chief at ServiceNow. So Bill, reserve us a spot in the VIP club on your new yacht. PM
Composable ERP: Business Heaven and IT Hell
Spend N years working in IT and you will see some things come full circle. Remember how SAP’s major selling point was one integrated system vs. “best-of-breed that didn’t breed”? Well, guess what, best-of-breed is back! And it has a new name: composable ERP.
The idea of composable ERP is that applications from multiple vendors will work together, joined in harmony by a database, platform, UX, and a butt-load of APIs (see the illustration above). This sounds amazing, but anyone who ever integrated enterprise software will tell you this is a utopian ideal for the business and a living nightmare for IT.
Setting aside the whole DB and Cloud subject, all the blocks of this magical ERP will need to communicate with each other. Will platform of choice play nicely with all the players? Will APIs actually do what is expected? Who will connect them? Who will maintain, support, and monitor all those connections and integrations? One article bravely states that “in the cloud, it becomes the vendor's problem to get all these bits and pieces to run”. Right. As we say in the South, “bless your heart”. When your financial postings don’t work, it will ultimately be your problem.
My family was one of the first cord-cutters, we got tired of paying for cable TV and disconnected it in favor of 2 streaming services. These days, cord-cutting is mainstream. But now to get all the different content, we need to subscribe to a multitude of streaming services, bringing the cost almost to the cable TV levels. And while our family manages this by switching services on and off, in the enterprise world, switching off, say, a sales module for a month is just not the thing. So, before anyone gets sold on the grand promise of The Composable ERP Paradise, ask if this will not become the very problem it’s meant to solve. JP
Appian Process Mining: Can You Strike Gold?
Ian Murphy writes over at Enterprise Times about Appian diving further into process mining: "Process mining, workflow and automation are now a single solution." Appian CEO Matt Calkins describes a relationship between these things: "Process mining describes the past and workflow the future."
I encountered a nascent form of process mining in my first SAP implementation over a decade ago. In the hypercare support room, there was a big monitor off to one side that showed how documents were flowing through the SAP system. It was interesting to see that setup, but hypercare wasn't really the right time to show it off. First of all, since it was the initial SAP go-live, there was no established history of process tracking - no one knew how long any of these things would take, so the data had very little meaning. Second, it was hypercare…the time when things go horribly wrong. The wrong time to show Very Important People a monitor that just tells you you're failing.
As I read around about process mining in its current form, I see signs of evolved usage. For example, UiPath offers a process mining solution as part of its automation platform. If you read through its "what is process mining?" page, you can see how the information that's gathered is used to further enhance automation and workflow decisions. This appears to be Appian's perspective, too, in describing those things as a single solution.
It makes sense to me that process mining is best when packaged with other tools into a cohesive solution. It also says that to actually see value out of it, you need to go hard on automation. PM
ABAP Syntax Overload
In our latest Nerdcast episode, Paul Hardy himself admitted that he was not a fan of the new (i.e. 7.4 and later) ABAP syntax. It made me feel strangely empowered to write this article and get it off my chest: I don’t care for most of new syntax either. It’s difficult to read, impossible to debug, and doesn’t solve anything.
After a brief “oh, cool” moment, I just don’t find any practical use for most of it. REDUCE, LET, FOR…IN, EXCEPT, meshes – see ya, wouldn’t want to be ya! And too many times the functional code style looks like such a weird flex. Horst Keller said this best:
You use functional ABAP for two reasons:
- you can code easier
- your programs become better readable.In the moment, one of the above breaks, you don't use functional ABAP, but split into several statements.
Not all new is bad, of course. I admit that when I first heard about the inline declarations, I thought it was the dumbest idea. (How hard is it to add a DATA command?) And now I think it's the bee’s knees. String templates are also cool (they existed before 7.4 but are perceived as "new:) and table expressions are OK, even though they raise an exception instead of sy-subrc. But whenever you feel an itch to use new syntax or functional style just to show off, please listen to Horst. JP
Google Cloud Is Getting Fluffier
Cloud Wars is one of my favorite places to get cloud news. I think Bob Evans really gets it as he continues to convince folks of the idea that cloud is the "greatest growth market the world has ever known". You really should just subscribe to them.
Evans has been bullish on Google Cloud, and as a super fanboy of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) he's got me listening. Their Q1 results were just released, and the big news is that their cloud revenue was up 44% - a growth rate above the other major players. GCP is part of "Google Cloud" proper, so I don't know whether the IaaS/PaaS services in GCP are huge contributors or if the real fireworks are elsewhere in the Google Cloud umbrella.
But I do know - and as we highlight in other stories in this issue of the Nerdletter - that enterprise software execs pop in and out of firms like a game of whack-a-mole. Rob Enslin, who came to Google Cloud from SAP in 2019, is moving on to become co-CEO of UiPath (also called out in this issue!). Enslin was brought on shortly after Thomas Kurian became CEO of Google Cloud, himself having moved from Oracle. We called out Bill McDermott's move to ServiceNow elsewhere in this issue.
The shifting sands of the cloud market tells me that, even though it may seem like decades of cloud things have happened, we are at the very beginning of what cloud computing will do for enterprises. I am confident that, from a tech standpoint, I have no idea what I'll be doing in 5 years. And that is SO EXCITING TO ME. PM