Notes from DSAG

In contrast to last year, when there were very visible signs of revolt against the arrogant and monopolistic behaviour of SAP and its management, the mood this year at the DSAG (German speaking SAP User Group) Annual Congress was more realistic: customers continue to be very dissatisfied but realize that DSAG is no source of miracles. In his presentation, Prof. Karl Liebstückel continued to emphasize the need for lower cost of ownership, lower complexity and higher sustainability of SAP solutions. He reiterated the lack of evidence of additional value of SAP’s enterprise support. The chairmen of the special interest groups added to this list – the lack of SOA in Business Suite 7, the disappointment about Business by Design (the work group has too few members), the inconsistenrt state of verticals. No surprises – all very well known issues. DSAG management made every attempt to sell the stretching of SAP’s maintenance increase intervals as an achievement of its negotiations with SAP.
The current DSAG chairman is no CIO and apparently a number of CIOs felt poorly represented and threatened to create their own SAP CIO group – separate and without relationship to DSAG. DSAG, now representing about 50% of the German SAP users and 15% in Austria and Switzerland respectively, was quick to embrace the separatists: Prof. Liebstückel announced the creation of a CIO advisory board to balance his more academic and technology oriented origin.
And then Léo Apotheker made his first speech in front of about 3000 quite critical users. He was nervous, mixed up places (mistook Bremen for Berlin) and after one or two minutes of warming up delivered quite a good pitch. After bashing the press for all the unnecessary criticism about SAP he went on to emphasize how important customer relations, sustainability, agility and service quality are in a time of economic crisis. A lot of ”tikkun olam” a day after yom kippur.
Very convincing, very much to the point for everybody who had no idea about the real issues of the SAP users or had not listened to the lengthy list of top concerns the DSAG board had laid out in the session before Léo’s. His pitch was a good sales pitch but a poor example of positive vendor reaction to customer needs. He gave himself very high marks for the revolutionary, KPI-based enterprise support (no customer yet has really reported advantages that were quantifiable and higher than the extra costs) and cited positive verdicts from Gartner on the KPI system (without mentioning that Gartner had a key role in developing the KPIs).
Senior DSAG members noted that while the presentation was well delivered it continued the tradition of widening the mental gap between SAP’s management and the SAP users. A certain amount of resignation could be felt and customers I spoke with expressed a more realistic view than a year before: they start to understand that there is no substitute for their own, very personal strategy. Emancipation is not an easy process. It requires a lot of information (not sourced from the vendor’s marketing department), thinking and reflection and, above all, determination.