If SAP Built The Electric Car
Former SAP executive Shai Agassi left to create an electric car company called Better Place, inspiring SAP community member Mario Herger to write a satirical blog post speculating on what it would look like if SAP built an electric car.
My favorite quip, in a raft of hilarious riffs on the foibles of SAP's enterprise software business practices, is this one:
The exchange of the battery can only be done with external consultants, but they are already fully booked for the next 12 months. As workaround you receive a 10 miles long power cord.The post highlights a half-dozen or so themes that permeate SAP's culture and the work product that results from that culture. If SAP management is smart, it will look at these as a starting point to revamping its reputation. And simply working the public relations angle isn't enough -- some of the issues implied by Herger's post require SAP rethink how it goes about its business:
- SAP forces customers to buy and spend more than they need;
- SAP makes it very difficult for customers to work with other technology vendors;
- SAP offers absurd work-arounds to problems created by its own technology;
- SAP products are chock-a-block with highly-engineered features that no one needs;
- SAP products are painful to customize; and
- SAP tools produce reports that are impossible for common mortals to understand.
Culture is a hard thing to change in a company because it takes commitment from the most senior levels of management, especially when it doesn't happen quickly enough or show immediate results. This is why change agents often try to attack problems with short time horizons and metrics that can be used easily to demonstrate the success of a new approach. SAP is in the throes of reinventing itself, but is not doing so in a timely fashion. With the wolves of cloud computing howling at its door, time isn't on its side.
[Image source: Arto Teras]