The Narrative of and about SAP

What does the narrative do? It is a meaningful narrative for a group or culture - including a community such as the SAP community of values. One function of the narrative is to condense, summarize, and concentrate reality, thereby reducing complexity. Narratives can help break down causal chains and disentangle cause-and-effect relationships. This makes these meaningful narratives attractive, sometimes also dangerous.

Meaningful narratives should come from the SAP Supervisory Board and Executive Board. Who else should explain IT trends in a holistic and sustainable way? Currently, the SAP community lacks an overall picture from which new things can grow - sustainability! SAP loses itself in technical sophistry, the repetition of familiar buzzwords, and the presentation of banal application examples. However, the SAP Supervisory Board and Executive Board should boldly go ahead and use the narrative in a strategic and visionary way.

The technological driver for narrative in IT is digital transformation. Based on a strong foundation, it is important to tell stories about roadmaps and strategies. We are storytellers and listeners at the same time. Narrative condenses reality and reduces complexity.

Most existing customers identify with SAP - for this reason, the negative Net Promoter Score hurts: Currently, fewer users recommend SAP software than there are supporters. There is a lack of grassroots support, where the 2027/2030 maintenance extension exists only on paper, but no statements are offered regarding practical implementation.

The issue of AnyDB after 2025 has not yet been resolved by SAP. The narrative for a release change to S/4 is also missing. What started well many years ago with Hana, when Professor Hasso Plattner and ex-SAP Chief Technology Officer Vishal Sikka told exciting stories about Hana and many anecdotes about HAsso's New Architecture (HANA) circulated in the community.

The power of narrative is not new. Its importance has been suppressed and forgotten. In 2008 at the Media Days in Munich, Sebastian Turner of the advertising agency Scholz and Friends said that the newspaper should be understood as a place of community. This statement is even more true for the web and social media.

"News is now available everywhere, and it's free"., according to Dirk Ippen, then owner of the Munich-based newspaper publishing house, "but a newspaper unites a specific target group into solidarity systems."

The SZ and FAZ are read by an educated and business-educated elite who identify with the newspaper. (Source: Medientage München 2008, Printgipfel: Publishing - Wachstum unter veränderten Bedingungen. Cross and lateral thinking in times of cross-media).

Narrative is communication with a community of values, or with the SAP community: "Whoever practices communication is at the service of another and passes on to him a gift that shapes, forms and transforms him, so that the one who gives communication and the one who receives it become a new third: the communion."defines Gisbert Greshake.

He is professor emeritus of Catholic dogmatics and ecumenism and has taught at the Gregorian University in Rome and in Freiburg im Breisgau.