SAP’s Narrative

A common narrative serves to unite a certain group of people, like the SAP community. One of its roles is to summarize a complex reality. Narrative can help to solve mysteries and untangle chains of causation. Narrative can make sense of the world by simplifying it.

The common narrative in the SAP community should be dictated by SAP’s management – who else could customers, consultants and partners help make sense of its product world? Right now, SAP’s narrative is littered with buzzwords, redundancies and trivial use cases, even though customers need strategy and actionable insights.

For example, extended maintenance for Business Suite 7 until 2027/2030 is a nice tale of SAP listening to its customers, but there are no practical guidelines on how to execute it. The narrative for what will happen to AnyDB after 2025 is yet to be written. Fact-based story telling about the switch to S/4 Hana is nowhere to be seen.

A common narrative can bridge the gap between story tellers (SAP) and listeners (customers, consultants, partners). Especially concerning digital transformation and the S/4 Hana release change, the SAP community needs a solid foundation, reliable roadmaps, and thought-out strategies. A common narrative would serve to reduce complexity, but SAP has to start wielding it soon – otherwise, it might not stay in charge of its own narrative for long.