Thank you Marco Lenck

The board work at the DSAG user association is characterized by two essential parameters. It is voluntary and time-consuming. DSAG e. V. is one of the largest IT user associations worldwide with a budget in the millions. In addition to the responsibility to be borne, the time required is also challenging.

Marco Lenck is not one of my closest SAP friends. We only ran into each other a few times. From a distance, I always appreciated his work for the association and, as my DSAG friends told me, his dedication was always exemplary.

Ultimately, the chairman of a user association is always also a mediator between the grassroots and the manufacturer. Marco Lenck has orchestrated this balancing act between DSAG members as existing SAP customers and SAP itself in an exemplary manner. For this, he deserves the thanks of the entire SAP community.

Where there is a lot of light, there is also shadow. Thus I want to connect the farewell of Marco Lenck also with a wish from my side: Become more serious and more scientific! Market and opinion research in a business environment is not a pony farm where you shout into the crowd: Who is for and who is against organic vegetables?

All DSAG surveys are atrocious from a mathematical and statistical perspective. No one should be accused or blamed here for not being able to create water-tight opinion polls, because ultimately it is higher mathematics or statistics.

Dealing with population, standard deviation, normalization etc. is only the first step. There are specialists and institutes that have years of experience in identifying needs. No DSAG member would ask these market researchers to formulate a development request to SAP.

Even editor-in-chief Färbinger with his unfinished computer science degree seems to be more sensitive. DSAG press releases regularly misrepresent changes in percentages: If 24 percent of respondents agreed with a certain statement last year and 31 percent this year, then agreement has not increased by seven percent, but by seven percentage points, or by about 29 percent if 24 is the base at 100 percent.

However, genuine market and opinion research is not about percentage calculations, which every good businessman should be able to do, but about the scientific and correct question right from the start: Do you think organic vegetables are right and healthy? That is a nice and polite question. But the answer will hardly say anything about the market chances of organic vegetables on the shelves of a discounter. I feel the same way about many of the questions in the numerous DSAG surveys.

The association attempted to survey the evaluation of SAP's product strategy and roadmaps with the following request: "Against the background of your digitization activities, how would you rate the following statement? I consider the SAP product strategy and roadmaps to be resilient in terms of investment security and predictability, and I trust them."

My impression: as many buzzwords as possible in a question, so that in the end the result can be interpreted in any direction. Here, the DSAG association notes an increase of "seven percent" from 2019 (24 percent) to 2020 (31 percent) for the answer "Do I fully agree" and "Do I mostly agree", see DSAG press release on www.dsag.de.

Of course, the population of 2019 and 2020 was not normalized and the "positive" answers were summed up to 100 percent, while the answer "I don't know/no information" was not taken into account. This approach borders on manipulation when one possible answer is eliminated and the remaining answers are made 100 percent of the population.

Too bad about the honest effort to find out the opinion of us DSAG members and SAP existing customers. I wish that Marco Lenck's successor would get a grip on this important DSAG project of market and opinion research.