Digital Transformation & Digital Simplicity

It cannot be said often enough: transformation processes and a paradigm shift in IT are business and organizational practice.

SAP also seems to have noticed a little of this. For a few months now, the Walldorf-based company has had a CDO, Chief Digital Officer. However, he is not concerned with the digital transformation of use and business cases, but believes that cloud computing has already solved all the problems.

What a mistake! Run simple, dear CDO!

Once again, SAP produces quite excellent software and at the same time has no idea about the market. The engineering skills and IT knowledge are there. But the cheap talk about supposed IT trends is embarrassing and treacherous: SAP has no idea!

As SAP CEO Bill McDermott says, "Run Simple." Yes, dear Bill, but the organizational structures and processes of your existing customers are not that "simple". Use and business cases with and without Hana should be intuitive to use. But the algorithms themselves will never be "simple". The correct term should be: Digital Simplicity.

Industry 4.0? At the CIO Conference in Munich in mid-May, the analysts from Gartner emphasized that there will also be an Industry 5.0! So we should be careful not to chase after short-term and loud buzzwords.

What sounds convincing and exciting today may be a dead end tomorrow. But waiting is not an option, the Gartner analysts also said - and we need a culture of error, so running into the dead end must be accepted.

SAP should refrain from the intensive use of ephemeral buzzwords and look behind the scenes and at its existing customers. That is where a digital transformation is taking place that needs digital simplicity.

Like many things in life, Digital Transformation has two sides: a revolutionary manifestation driven by the sometimes dramatic changes in IT; an evolutionary manifestation based on the globalization of business processes and relationships.

Technology is almost always disruptive and comes in waves - Gartner already spoke of the digital tsunami two years ago! With their complex processes and relationships, the organizational structures and workflows of existing SAP customers can often only be changed gradually and evolutionarily - even if Bill McDermott mantra-like preaches "Run Simple".

Digital transformation is a megatrend and paradigm shift. Digital simplicity is an intellectual, organizational and complex challenge. Digital Simplicity should make it possible to consolidate and simplify business processes externally - internally, the processes will probably become more complex due to the technical possibilities, see Hana and the entire range of functions of PAL (SAP Hana Predictive Analysis Library), CDS (Core Data Services) and BFL (Business Function Library).

By definition, digital simplicity cannot be "run simple. McDermott is wrong here! Simplicity - the art of reducing complexity - is a science, as the work of Professor Hasso Plattner at HPI in Potsdam shows. Hana and the surrounding IT architecture can be understood as a prototype for the art of reducing complexity.

Likewise, Hana and the associated products and services are an important foundation for digital transformation. Book author Benedikt Weibel: Simplicity - the art of reducing complexity.

"The world is complex. Being able to distinguish the important from the unimportant is necessary for survival. For more than 2,000 years, philosophers, mathematicians, physicians, psychologists, economists and management teachers, architects, painters and writers have grappled with the phenomenon of simplicity."

When will SAP learn? "Run Simple," says SAP CEO McDermott, but close is also a miss!