The Boring Enterprise Nerdletter #20: Influence SAP, Microservices, Green, Connectors, Recruiting, Wearables
Hi there,
This is the 20th issue of our Nerdletter and the round number feels like it begets a short retrospective. There isn’t a conversion table of newsletter issues to human years and this issue could be either a toddler or a teenager. (For parents, the difference sometimes feels minimal.)
Either way, this is a formative stage and just the beginning of bright future ahead (hopefully). We could not have done this without you, our subscribers and readers. Thank you for your support!
-Jelena and Paul
Psst, Want to Influence SAP?
Discovering that there is a place to submit ABAP improvement requests to SAP feels like stumbling upon a magical portal accidentally left open by a scatter-minded wizard.
I certainly hope though that the Influence Opportunity “SAP BTP ABAP Environment” (the official name) will not just disappear. It runs continuously, i.e. there is no specific deadline for the request submission, and is accepting new requests for anything ABAP related. Don’t let the BTP nomenclature scare you, there is an option to enter requests even for classic ABAP.
If you have any improvement suggestions for ABAP or development tools, go to this page (registration required), click Submit Improvement, and influence away. While there, check out the existing improvements too and vote (see some of my recommendations). But shsh, don’t tell anyone I sent you! JP
It's Not Easy Being Green (But It Should Be)
I parse the word "sustainable" in two ways.
A corporate BS buzzword focused on by companies who don't want to lose their Millennial/Gen Z workforce, mumbling about making safe communities and locally resilient supply chains.
An environmentalist term meaning this object or activity can persist in such a way as not to immediately destroy our planet/climate.
A couple of items in the last week made me think about these two definitions. First, Julia White of SAP gave a quick talk at Cloud Wars Expo which included some mentions of sustainability. I am cynically inclined to interpret most corporate folks as acting in the first parsing above - but Julia and her interviewer's chat actually left me feeling more charitable. Give it a listen.
With regard to the second, I saw news that Google and Oracle suffered data center outages in a recent London heat wave. The cloud computing market sure ain't gonna get smaller, so cloud providers have to both plan for heat disasters and - more importantly - be good citizens of power usage. A study in Science found that data centers use around 1% of all worldwide electrical power, and a great deal of that power goes into cooling. Climate change should be top of mind for an industry that relies on cooler temperatures and massive amounts of power.
Time will tell whether corporations are truly serious about buzzword-chasing. I hope they are. PM
Microservice Megadisasters
In the beginning, there was the big, bad monolith that did not want to change. Then along came Netlix and said let's break the monolith apart into the small pieces. These pieces could then be put into the containers and shipped off to the Cloud to be easily scaled up or down, depending on the demand.
These Lego brick-like pieces called "microservices" and they are supposed to make it as easy to scale SAP systems as to open more cash registers at a supermarket. Except when not.
Turns out monolith is not necessarily bad and microservices are not always great. In this interview, the author of Monolith To Microservices book Sam Newman talks not just about how to break up a monolith but also when you probably shouldn’t. This quote could not have been truer in the SAP world that is sometimes too tech-obsessed after being tech-starved:
We focus on the tech tool, not the thing that the tech tool lets you do.
When considering microservices for your next project, think what they would "let you do" and if they’re the right solution in the first place. To avoid, you know, a megadisaster. JP
Fishing For Nerds
Over at diginomica, Mark Chillingworth describes a few CIOs out there in the world doing the best they can in the tech talent crunch. They're making headway by transforming recruiting from an externally-sourced job to an arm of IT itself. A key finding:
talent acquisition is, like technology, not just a bolt-on, but a strategic approach and a good investment.
The folks Chillingworth talked with saw benefit from in-sourcing recruitment. Vital to success appears to be giving recruiters incentives to go the extra mile, and relationships that can only be built with colleagues. When tech talent ups its game, the business notices.
I often work with IT teams. It is no lie to say they are stressed, short-staffed, and in need of skill-sharpening time. Getting good tech talent means investing in lots of things, and recruiting is a key factor. The best people are never on the market, so you need something more than LinkedIn spammers to find them. I have worked with recruiters in the past and I can tell you: if the recruiter is invested in the business they're hiring for, it makes a huge difference. It follows the same adage as other talent: you get what you pay for. PM
Welcome To Connector Hell - Here's Your API Key
I don't know how I got there, but I landed on the SAP Open Connectors help portal. Open Connectors helps "unify the developer experience across all kinds of applications and services". Check out how many connectors are available for integration use.
Every platform I touch has a similar concept - there's a need for simplifying connections between apps, clouds, databases, and everything in between. If you can draw a picture of what you're trying to do, you can probably find a pre-built connector somewhere to smooth the path.
The ubiquity of connectors shines a light on that eternal question: build or buy? If I can make a Visio drawing and just plug in little pieces with API keys and credentials, doesn't that lead to agility? If I can hand-write my own custom application in any language I choose, doesn't that mean that I can truly make anything I desire?
If I need to build something in order to communicate that thing's value, I will glue connectors together all day long. If I need to make something that can stand the test of time, I'll happily open VSCode. But the world is changing, and I don't think that distinction will remain as clear as it seems at the moment. PM
Power To The Wearables!
‘Member when wearable tech was all the rage a few years ago? The warehouse workers were to dash around wearing Google Glass and cyber gloves that would automatically enter TOs and do PGI in SAP. Whatever happened to that?
Besides usability, security, and other concerns, powering up those devices was a challenge. I remember one year at TechEd in Vegas some SAP Mentors were given a cool t-shirt that would light up at the sound of music. The shirt came with a massive battery pack that was awkwardly hanging there as if you were planning to drown yourself.
But lately the scientists are taking a recipe straight out of The Matrix cookbook and looking at the obvious energy source: humans. So, maybe we will swallow the blue pill and see another hype wave of the wearables soon? Now sorry, I got to run, my fitness tracker has low battery! JP