Mind the Gap

The well-known saying "Mind the Gap" from the London Underground is a fitting synonym for the current IT disaster and also the motto of the Tangro Customer Day on November 17 in Heidelberg, where I will be giving a keynote speech.

Professor Hasso Plattner has always known: Innovation and continuity don't mix! From the beginning of the Hana development, he and SAP nevertheless promised a non-disruptive development.

The "release change" from any SQL database to Hana should take place without conflict and without escalations. Where it says "Mind the Gap" in London Underground Stations, the computer scientist in the data center says: "Never change a running system."

Anyone switching to a Hana platform with ERP/ECC 6.0 or the Business Suite must naturally be told: Mind the Gap!

The early adopters of SoH (Suite on Hana) needed hundreds of man-hours to adapt the application to the database and vice versa. In the meantime, the migration for BW users (SAP Business Warehouse) to Hana is a manageable routine and "Mind the Gap" is not much more than a polite but negligible announcement.

The picture is completely different for ERP and business suite users: Hardly any existing SAP customers are considering the step into the new Hana world. All the experts are calling for digital transformation, but they are also warning: "Mind the Gap!

What SAP likes to see:

Vfrom on-premise to on-demand (cloud computing), from traditional SQL databases to Hana (in-memory computing), from SAP GUI to Fiori, from R/3 MES/MII to Industry 4.0, from ESA to IoT.

(The latter needs a little explanation: ESA was SAP's SOA variant and meant Enterprise Service Architecture, later the term was discarded and an agreement was reached with the IT community on service-oriented architecture, SOA, which gave rise to, among other things, the Internet of Things and Services - in English: IoT, Internet of Things).

These "A to B" examples are dangerous and equally interesting! All these transformation processes are complex and thus cannot be executed in one step. These projects need time and planning - intermediate steps are necessary, and attention must be paid to the gaps.

And already one loses oneself in the infinite. We know from our school days that there is room for one more number between every pair of numbers. This infinite regress makes it difficult to recognize gaps as well as the starting and ending points of our courageous step.

Mind the Gap becomes a journey to infinity (see also the paradoxes of Zeno of Elea, an ancient Greek philosopher who is counted among the Pre-Socratics). More on Zeno and Georg Cantor, the founder of set theory and "inventor" of infinity, in my keynote at Tangro.

We are experiencing a digital transformation process that is largely based on technical innovations. Industry 4.0 and IoT are becoming reality. Then there are the business management and organizational aspects: Maybe we need a DV/Org head again and not a CIO?

In the current transformation process, "Mind the Gap" applies to providers and users alike. Harvard professor Clayton M. Christensen thus posed the obvious question in his book "The Innovator's Dilemma": Why are established companies losing the competition for groundbreaking innovations?

One answer is the two sides of the coin "digital transformation", one is called "Mind the Gap" and the other "Never change a running system".

Professor Christensen clarified and I have added comments in brackets to his statement:

"When a company (SAP) tries to develop a disruptive technology (Hana and S/4) to the point where it meets the needs of customers (existing SAP customers) in established markets (SAP community) - which most leading companies do - its failure is all but certain."