SAP - Customers First or Business as Usual?

Their customers already live in the digital world. Now the big companies want to follow them into the promised land.

In recent years, concepts for "digital transformation" have been eagerly drafted. In some cases, bold visions have emerged, in others, down-to-earth concepts.

What comes across so lightly as a blueprint in meetings of the strategy and business development departments becomes real hard work in the hands of the CIOs at the latest. The need for integration and change management is enormous.

And it requires a lot of new skills as well as a different mind-set that many traditional IT vendors and IT service providers unfortunately cannot offer their customers.

So what does it take to successfully shape the digital transformation? And above all, what does SAP have to do with it? Is it an enabler or a stumbling block on the path to digital business?

Customer first or business as usual?

The motto of this year's DSAG Annual Congress is well chosen.

The keynote speeches by DSAG Chairman Marco Lenck and SAP Executive Board member Bernd Leukert will focus on customer orientation and digitization and will be entitled "Customer First".

However, if one follows the rest of the agenda, it becomes clear that the topic of "digital transformation" is not yet really on anyone's mind in the SAP community.

Classic topics dominate the discussion and the question of how SAP partners make their customers fit for digital business remains in the background.

SAP is in an incredibly good starting position in the race for digital transformation. After all, few CIOs and newly appointed Chief Digital Officers (CDO) will claim that the digital transformation of processes and business models can be successful and purposeful without integration with the backend systems - that is, SAP.

Nevertheless, the name SAP rarely comes up in discussions with decision-makers. S

ou are not currently relying on SAP for the modern, cloud-based design of the digital customer relationship, even if you have the corresponding solutions (e.g., Hybris).