Snake Oil or Wonder Drug - The art of the possible in SAP

Today is the first day of SAPPHIRE / TechEd in Madrid and the key note was full of how IT could be with the help of SAP. I was also lucky enough to attend TechEd in Las Vegas where the message was similar if somewhat biased towards how SAP HANA could help.

Now I can see how this "Nexus of Forces" (Mobile, Cloud, In-Memory, Social) could change the way IT works for a business, but my problem is the yawning gap between the vision the IT I talk to most weeks.

I covered some of the problems that exist in my last blog on 3rd World IT, but even without these problems where would you start if you were a CIO.

• Do you turbo charge with SAP HANA
• Mobilize with SAP Mobile Platform
• Automate with SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration
• Beautify with Gateway / Personas / UI5
• Move it all to the cloud and take part in the Ariba network

or do nothing cos it's all too hard to figure out how to move under the weight of your existing systems which are sucking resources away from innovation.

I think I see 3 general paths to take :-

1) It's all snake oil : Assume that all of the benefits above are currently snake oil or will take some time to be "affordable". In this strategy you should sweat the assets you already have and make sure you can run them at the lowest possible cost using commodity resources.

2) Fool Rush In : Assume that all this stuff is amazing and will transform your business overnight. Start many parallel projects and implement the dream. You will need a crack team of technology savie people who can solve problems on the fly and make this stuff work.

3) Step back and Plan : Assume that some of the above stuff might help but go through an exercise to plan where it will help the most - and start projects from this list. For this you will need some Enterprise Architects and a crack team of technology savie people who can solve problems on the fly and make this stuff work.

I think the wise path is 3, but I see too many SAP customers stuck at 1 (often because of badly written outsource contracts).

3rd World IT

Have you ever wondered why some companies find it really hard to adopt new stuff and others seem to eat it up.

I think it could be similar to the discussions that some people have about why 3rd world countries can't just up and become first world over night. For a country to make this move they have to have certain things in place that can take years to achieve. These would include :

• Basic infrastructure (roads, sewerage, electricity etc)
• Peace and Law and Order
• Stable Political Environment and Low Levels of corruption (this never goes away - see David Cameron dinner parties)
• Natural Resources (to fund the economy)
• Stable Commercial and Trading system

Without these they can't jump to the 1st world as the 1st world just assumes that most of the above is already their. Would a Starbucks work with out the above ? Are iPhone apps important without these ?

So what are the IT indicators for a company with 3rd world IT ?

You might think that this would be simple, surely 1st world IT companies has new shiny computers and 3rd world don't, but I think it is more complex than this. Lets work on the items above one by one :

Infrastructure

It is one thing to have a super set of hardware with fancy virtualisation software, but if you don't have people who know how to use it, it is like having power stations you can't fire up or a sewerage system no one know how to un-block. Just look what happened when the Romans left Britain, all the infrastructure was their but no one knew how it worked.

Peace and Law and Order

If everyone is fighting and you can't trust the state you get anarchy. This is where policies and guidelines fit into a 1st world IT company. 3rd world companies spend too much time on civil wars over competing vendor stacks.

Stable Political Environment and Low Levels of corruption

In the context of 3rd world IT - I would see partners and software providers playing the role of aid agencies and/or corrupt government agencies. Get these right and you can build a stable platform that can help you grow, get it wrong and they will suck funds away from where you need it.

Natural Resources

Probably obvious but you can't get from 3rd world to 1st world for free, if IT isn't funded as an asset all you can do is limp along. In don't blame companies for under funding IT as done badly IT can spend money quicker then anyone for few benefits.

Stable Commercial and Trading system

I would suggest that in the 3rd world IT context a commercial system is best represented by the processes that decide which projects get done based on robust business cases.

So what is your IT department ? 1st world or 3rd world ?