leonardo.report

Leonardo da Vinci as a polymath is a role model for C-level management to tackle digital transformation.

This transformation is a holistic task for business administration, organization, law and technology. You need a polymath or all C-positions, management, product managers, production managers, lawyers, HCM managers and others more at the round table.

Naturally, SAP has also discovered the topic of digital transformation for itself - but has decided not to meet this challenge with "The Digital Core" (ERP/ECC 6.0 and S/4) or the Hana Data Management Suite, but to create its own framework for it.

This framework concept is called Leonardo and, according to SAP CEO Bill McDermott, should generate more license revenue than the ERP core in a few years.

Once again, McDermott seems to be doing the math without the host: strategy and direction fit, the name is well chosen, existing customers need answers - but SAP has no core competence in the sub-areas of Leonardo!

SAP is rightly the ERP world market leader! Over the past decades, SAP has been able to build up a unique core competence in the areas of finance, controlling, assets, production and personnel management.

The story is told again and again: Hans-Georg Plaut explains marginal costing to Henning Kagermann, who programs it out in Abap. This pretty anecdote may be doubted, but it nevertheless clearly shows the roots of SAP's core competencies.

And now Leonardo:

According to changing and diverging SAP definitions, the following topics can be found in Leonardo: Machine Learning (ML), Blockchain, Data Intelligence, Big Data, Internet of Things (IoT), Analytics and of course Design Thinking.

The latter is being promoted intensively by SAP co-founder and Supervisory Board Chairman Professor Hasso Plattner. But what all the topics have in common is that they were not invented by SAP; SAP is not even one of the early adopters. All of the topics were incorporated into SAP's own portfolio when they were already a general megatrend.

It is good that SAP is addressing these megatrends in the form of Leonardo and wants to create compatibility with the ERP core. Some existing SAP customers will benefit from this.

But you won't find core competence in these topics at SAP - other IT companies can do ML, blockchain, analytics and IoT better, have more experience and mature solutions.

SAP partners and existing SAP customers often invest more resources in Leonardo subareas than SAP itself. On July 11 of last year, one thus had to read the following cryptic sentence in an SAP press release:

SAP Leonardo Innovation Services can be seamlessly linked to the recently announced SAP Leonardo innovation system.

Résumé:

SAP Leonardo is compatible with SAP Leonardo. And complementary:

"Increasing digitization puts companies at a crossroads"

said Michael Kleinemeier, member of the SAP SE Executive Board and head of SAP Digital Business Services.

"SAP Leonardo Innovation Services offer customers a safe way to try out new technologies to find the optimal solution for their business."

The topic of digital transformation is far too important to be left to SAP alone. It is important to think outside the box and learn from companies that have real core competence in Leonardo's subareas:

Siemens, Nvidia, Bosch, Intel, GE, Huawei, AWS, and many more - the vast majority of which are existing SAP customers, which makes things a lot easier.

To ensure that knowledge and experience from the Leonardo sub-areas is organized and disseminated further, there will be a printed quarterly report leonardo.report with the same web address from 2019.

The pilot issue will be published this year at the DSAG Annual Congress in October. leonardo.report will address all topics of digital transformation, examine them for added value for the SAP community, and present the true sources of knowledge and expertise for Machine Learning, Blockchain, Data Intelligence, Big Data, Internet of Things, Analytics, and of course Design Thinking.

All these issues are far too important to be left to SAP alone - we can do better together.