Paralyzed by digitization

And if there really is no problem in the company - after a long and intensive search - that can only and exclusively be solved by artificial intelligence (AI), then you should at least start a blockchain, IoT or predictive analytics project.

The very last resort would be a design thinking workshop to find the business problems you don't see because you haven't understood digital transformation.

Paralyzed by digitization, you now sit in your office chair and stare at the blank screen. Looked at more closely, it is not the digital transformation that is causing us difficulties, but the oversupply of quick answers and the lack of orientation.

SAP presentations by Chief Technology Officer Bernd Leukert (see also the cover of leonardo.report - the SAP community's future magazine on digital transformation) and CEO Bill McDermott almost always boil down to the statement: Everything is possible! This overabundance of theoretical solution paths and roadmaps is hardly helpful in the harsh ERP reality.

For a greenfield approach, SAP's ERP, CRM and Leonardo offering is almost unmanageable. For a brownfield approach, this offering takes far too little account of legacy issues, cross-references, and dependencies.

In response to the digital transformation, SAP is sitting between all stools: On the one hand, the existing SAP customer finds an unstructured IT general store called "Leonardo", on the other hand, an ERP/CRM without any innovations or roadmaps worth mentioning. Anyone who wants to master digitization with SAP can choose between plague and cholera.

Little help also comes from most SAP partners; while they try to innovate with and without Leonardo, they quickly lose sight of the big picture and present only technical solutions.

But now every C-level manager knows that digital transformation is a business, organizational, technical and legal (licenses!) task.

Example:

A few weeks ago, SAP partner Itelligence proudly presented an IoT/RFID application. Industrial containers are automatically weighed and sorted, and the results are then transferred to an SAP ERP.

A technically sophisticated and successful solution, together with a suitable organization and appropriate business processes, probably an interesting application from a business point of view.

But what SAP licenses does the existing customer need for this application and what costs are incurred with regard to SAP's "indirect" use? How high is the financial license risk for the existing SAP customer? There is no answer to this from Itelligence - not even an explanation as to why there is no answer! Paralyzed by digitalization?