SAP Community - It's not too late

Few people are very concerned about the development of the SAP scene, because business management, marketing, technology, training and public relations are now evaluated only on the basis of spontaneous results and events.

Many SAP partners are focused on the "release upgrade" from ERP/ECC 6.0 to S/4 including Hana. The order books are full, and SAP's existing customers are coming in the door almost voluntarily.

The consequences of this momentary business success are clearly visible: Marketing is neglected and reduced to a zero-euro budget. Public relations and press work become a chore. A critical and constructive debate in roundtable discussions and press conferences is hardly to be found.

What many market participants are overlooking in this very "happy" phase is the generation problem. What will the situation be like after 2025, when the Hana and S/4 transformations have succeeded and all SAP's ERP systems are at home with the hyperscalers?

Who will be programming in Abap and Java on the SAP Cloud Platform (SCP) after 2030 if junior programmers are currently denied access to the SCP? Who will inform and explain the benefits of the SAP community to the next generation of business leaders if there will be no mass media, blogs and trade journalists?

The future looks bleak because many mistakes have been made in the past and are currently being made, the effects of which will not be visible tomorrow, but which cannot be corrected the day after tomorrow.

History has plenty of evidence for this!

In early March, one of these "proofs" was found in the Spiegel Online report on the Moscow IT start-up scene:

"The foundation for the IT boom was already laid when hardly anyone between Kaliningrad and Vladivostok knew what a computer was: in Soviet times. The communist leadership systematically promoted mathematical talent.

To this day, many Russian schools place a high value on mathematics as a subject, laying the groundwork for training successful programmers."

If you want to know exactly how long-term and sustainable this mathematical history is lived in Russia, you should read the book "The Proof of the Century: The Fascinating Story of Mathematician Grigori Perelman"by Masha Gessen, Suhrkamp, Berlin 2013.

Once again Spiegel Online from the beginning of March this year. Under the headline "We must not leave our children a black zero" by Thomas Fricke, one could read, among other things:

"The country is currently feeling the effects of a misunderstood black-zero zeal on all fronts. [...] One of the collateral damages of zealous debt limitation is that schools today lack teachers - also because it was once considered great not to hire teachers at all (in order, of course, to reduce debts).

Or that daycare workers are paid so poorly that no one can really be expected to do that anymore (which is why there is a shortage of people there, too). Or that suburban trains have become enterprises with lottery character. Or ministers are stuck in Africa with old machines."