Consistency

Perhaps it was overlooked that consistency is more important than integration? I conducted a long interview with SAP Executive Board member Christian Klein (appears online in a week on August 29 at 2 p.m. and in E-3 Magazine starting Monday, September 2).

In this interview, I try to get to the bottom of SAP's efforts to deliver expected and required cloud integration. Where is the big picture? Where are the necessary E2E processes? When will SAP have integrated business processes again - and not just isolated clouds and silos?

But Christian Klein said that consistent data models are just as important - perhaps even more important. This thought is exciting: If there were a binding, consistent data model for the customer, employee, supplier, etc. in the SAP universe, then perhaps the "integration" challenge would be solved by itself.

One data model for the business partner on-prem in S/4 and in the clouds SuccessFactors, Ariba, Fieldglass, Concur, Hybris, etc. Then SAP's existing customers could possibly also save the expensive SAP Data Hub and make do with Big Data tools from the open source community.

Christian Klein is working on a consistent data model, which of course already existed at SAP in R/3 times. But this virtue has unfortunately been lost in the meantime. The new mantra in the SAP community therefore seems to be "consistency" and not "integration".