In this third episode of ASUG Talks: Can­did Career Con­ver­sa­tions, sea­son 2, we talk with Jason Sprunk, Glob­al Direc­tor, GRM Sys­tems and Oper­a­tions, Glob­al Rev­enue Man­age­ment for Rock­well Automation. 

A full tran­script follows:

Lau­rel Nelson-Rowe:

So I am joined today by Jason Sprunk, Glob­al Direc­tor, GRM Sys­tems and Oper­a­tions, Glob­al Rev­enue Man­age­ment for Rock­well Automa­tion. Wel­come, Jason.

Jason Sprunk:

Hey, Lau­rel, thanks so much for the oppor­tu­ni­ty to speak with you today.

Nel­son-Rowe:

Thank you. And that title, that is a bit of a long one. Is that the most meaty title that you’ve ever had?

Sprunk:

Maybe? Yeah, it’s kind of, I think, meant to be all-encom­pass­ing of the dif­fer­ent teams that are under my purview. But yeah, it is a mouth­ful for sure, and a lit­tle bit redun­dant with the dou­ble ​‘glob­als’ there.

Nel­son-Rowe:

It’s quite impres­sive. Before we get to the gist of the career con­ver­sa­tion, I want­ed to take a step back. So tell us a lit­tle bit about where you grew up and did that affect what you became as an IT professional?

Sprunk:

Oh, for sure. Yeah. I grew up in a lit­tle small, small­ish town in north­ern Ohio, so the Mid­west. And I think ear­ly on I kind of start­ed to see that I want­ed to explore beyond the rur­al con­fines of the lit­tle town that I grew up in. I got to meet a lot of peo­ple ear­ly on in my life. One of the first jobs that I had, if you will, was as a paper boy, a news­pa­per car­ri­er. And that start­ed at age 10. And that kind of gave me an oppor­tu­ni­ty to meet lots of peo­ple and fig­ure out, gosh, peo­ple had lots of sto­ries and lots of expe­ri­ences, and help me see and feel as much of the world and peo­ple as I could. And so that kind of did shape a lit­tle bit from a career per­spec­tive what’s kind of dri­ven me and pro­pelled me in dif­fer­ent directions.

Nel­son-Rowe:

And what type of val­ues and prin­ci­ples from your child­hood per­haps con­tributed to your career and the pro­fes­sion­al that you’ve become?

Sprunk:

Think­ing about that news­pa­per job lit­er­al­ly be on time folks. Folks did­n’t get their news­pa­per and if it was­n’t a dry and con­ve­nient loca­tion, then you heard about it and you kind of learned through the gig that you had to show up and be present and do what was expected.

Oth­er lessons, I think, that came from those expe­ri­ences were just that being able to adapt com­mu­ni­ca­tion styles and talk with folks as they are, as they were. I remem­ber expe­ri­enc­ing folks that I ini­tial­ly could­n’t under­stand, and so try­ing to fig­ure out how to com­mu­ni­cate effec­tive­ly and things like that.

Anoth­er job in my teens was I did the fast-food gig that I think many folks have done. And that kind of informed a lot from a process per­spec­tive how things are done rapid­ly. No offense to those that have made a career in fast food, but that’s not some­thing that I thought would be a real­ly good long-term career for me. So it was a good expe­ri­ence to help me pro­pel into a broad­er stage, if you will.

Nel­son-Rowe:

But you learned the val­ue of process and oper­a­tions, per­haps long-term lessons that you applied as you began to think about a career in infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy. Did you always want a career in infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy, or did you get that through a cir­cuitous path?

Sprunk:

Yeah, very much cir­cuitous. In fact, as I think about that large ham­burg­er joint, if you will, I learned a lot about process and there were videos to do all the things, flip the burg­ers and make the fries, and make milk­shakes. And it did influ­ence me a lit­tle bit about think­ing about, gosh, repeata­bil­i­ty and process.

But real­ly at the out­set I thought I want­ed to be a his­to­ry teacher, and a social stud­ies teacher, and actu­al­ly went to school to become that. And it was only kind of the career path led me to imme­di­ate­ly go into grad school and a lit­tle bit of a piv­ot around infor­ma­tion­al or instruc­tion­al tech­nol­o­gy. I thought I would be in a teach­ing set­ting, but with tech­nol­o­gy at a core. But again, career oppor­tu­ni­ties kind of pre­sent­ed them­selves to take that kind of pas­sion of help­ing oth­ers and teach­ing folks how to use tech­nol­o­gy, but in a more cor­po­rate setting.

It was­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly an inten­tion­al out­come at the out­set, but it was, I think, an out­come of kind of being open to explor­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties as they arose or as folks said, hey, you might think about doing this.

Nel­son-Rowe:

Do you feel that you are an active career plan­ner, a respon­sive oppor­tunist, or some­thing of a hybrid in between?

Sprunk:

The plan is the plan until the plan changes, is a mot­to that I live and share with my team a bit. I had a bit of a plan. As I said, I had a plan to be a teacher. That plan did­n’t real­ly come to fruition. I did spend about a year in a school dis­trict as part of my practicum and learned that there was some real­ly inter­est­ing, neat parts of that job and some that was­n’t of appeal. But from a career plan­ning per­spec­tive, I would say I’ve had a plan, but the plan always has­n’t worked out to the design. And I’ve learned a lit­tle bit to be open to tak­ing risks. And when some­thing presents itself or some­body says, or a friend says, or a boss says, a man­ag­er says, you should real­ly think about doing this. So those hap­pen too. And I think in all cas­es, I’ve learned a lot. I’ve been chal­lenged and it again has helped me kind of think about being open, espe­cial­ly if the oppor­tu­ni­ty in front of me isn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly to the plan that I thought I had in my mind.

Nel­son-Rowe:

Tak­ing a lit­tle bit of a risk any­way. What was your first job relat­ed to IT and to SAP solu­tions in particular?

Sprunk:

The fun­ny thing is not real­ly a job, but in ele­men­tary school I went to a real­ly small parochial school and we had just got­ten these fan­cy new com­put­ers. They were TRS-80s and I had just got­ten my own at home. And so I was busy pro­gram­ming and basic and watch­ing lit­tle char­ac­ters on the screen bounce around and all that fun stuff. So I was asked to help the teacher in fifth grade teach basic pro­gram­ming on these TRS-80s in my lit­tle school, in my lit­tle town in Ohio. So that was kind of the first, I guess, unof­fi­cial or infor­mal job in col­lege. I helped out with our net­work­ing ser­vices and the com­put­er ser­vices stuff on cam­pus. I got to pull the first CAT 5 cable in the universities.

And then I kind of found a side gig help­ing pro­fes­sors incor­po­rate tech­nol­o­gy into their class­rooms. That turned into a lit­tle bit of more of a mon­e­tary gig, which then led to, again, anoth­er side gig while in col­lege, being a sys­tems oper­a­tor on an HP 3000 main­frame. So the tech­nol­o­gy thing was kind of a side gig for me while I was pur­su­ing the for­mal edu­ca­tion stuff. And it only kind of crys­tal­lized after I fin­ished under­grad and grad school that I decid­ed to go kind of full steam into the cor­po­rate world, not the edu­ca­tion world.

Nel­son-Rowe:

So in the cor­po­rate world and in the SAP world, I’m going to ask you your first light­ning round ques­tion to chal­lenge our guests to recap their IT careers in two min­utes or less. So what are the high­lights of that career that you’ve had so far in infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy and SAP solutions?

Sprunk:

Yeah, 30 plus coun­tries, count­less Go-Lives, count­less upgrades, hun­dreds of team mem­bers, tons of chal­lenges, lots of long week­ends with Go-Lives and upgrades and such, tons of learn­ing, tons of frus­tra­tion and chal­lenges with tech­nol­o­gy. But all in all just a super excit­ing kind of, I’d say, unpre­dictable at times set of oppor­tu­ni­ties that have pre­sent­ed them­selves. I’m not a super fre­quent job hop­per. I’ve only real­ly been with three com­pa­nies over the, I guess, 30-year career if you will – most­ly big, big com­pa­nies and new chal­lenges, but have been able to find those new chal­lenges with­in the con­fines of those companies.

Nel­son-Rowe:

Good recap. What’s been your favorite job role or respon­si­bil­i­ty so far?

Sprunk:

Yeah, because I’ve always been kind of at the inter­sec­tion of peo­ple, process and tech­nol­o­gy, usu­al­ly focused on enter­prise trans­for­ma­tion or more sim­ply, how can com­pa­nies help peo­ple use the tech­nol­o­gy bet­ter? Often­times, me and my teams are placed in unique spots where some­times I live in IT, some­times I’ve lived in HR, I’m in a dif­fer­ent part of the org these days.

But the favorite job, I think, was a par­tic­u­lar moment in time with just a won­der­ful team. We all kind of could close our eyes and know exact­ly where each oth­er was. We all knew what each oth­er’s favorite can­dy bar was. We all sup­port­ed each oth­er. We were act­ing as inter­nal con­sul­tants for a big­ger orga­ni­za­tion, and we had high demand of our inter­nal consultancy.

So it was just a real­ly fun time. Sta­ble, pret­ty pre­dictable in terms of the tech­nol­o­gy chal­lenges, but not too much chaos from a macro per­spec­tive. I also rec­ol­lect there’s always some things you don’t like. The traf­fic at the time stunk, but oth­er­wise the team was great. And it’s not to say my team isn’t great now, but there was just a mesh­ing and a team­ing that was just kind of one of those super great moments in time.

Nel­son-Rowe:

So it’s about the peo­ple, but it sounds like it was also about the can­dy bars. How did you get to know about the favorite can­dy bar? Did you absolute­ly need can­dy bars?

Sprunk:

Well, I mean, one of my men­tors, and she was my boss at the time, she real­ly took great efforts to know each per­son on a per­son­al lev­el. And I learned from her that when you man­age peo­ple… And there’s a dif­fer­ence for sure between man­ag­ing and lead­ing folks, lead­ing is an out­come of folks when they respect you and they know where you’re going. But as you get to be a bet­ter man­ag­er, I learned: a. you can’t man­age each per­son the same, and b. the more you know and under­stand what moti­vates a per­son and you can help them in their ups and downs and their career pro­gres­sions and all that. But one of the things she shared is some­thing sim­ple as just know­ing each per­son­’s favorite can­dy bar. Because if you know what their favorite can­dy bar is, if they’re hav­ing a bad day, get them the can­dy bar. If they’re hav­ing a great day, get them a can­dy bar to thank them for what they’ve done, which is one of those lit­tle kind of man­age­r­i­al life hacks that stuck with me. Now you might ask, do I know every­body’s favorite can­dy bar right now? I don’t. I endeav­or to. But yeah, that was one of those real­ly good lessons along the way.

Nel­son-Rowe:

And know­ing the indi­vid­ual and what might moti­vate them even on a very small scale. What about that most chal­leng­ing role, respon­si­bil­i­ty, project, job, over the course of your career so far?

Sprunk:

One par­tic­u­lar role comes to mind and there’s a gen­er­al theme when folks find out I was­n’t always real­ly a tech­nol­o­gy per­son. I was intend­ing to be a his­to­ry teacher. It cre­ates a lit­tle bit of intrigue, some­times resis­tance: Well who is this guy that’s going to come in and what does he know about this or that or the oth­er? I mean, that was a long time ago, I guess.

But the one super-chal­leng­ing role was this recov­ery team that I men­tioned, this kind of: ​“Hey, we need you to lead this team. There’s a par­tic­u­lar busi­ness func­tion capa­bil­i­ty that’s not work­ing as we thought it should. It’s not hit­ting the mark in terms of the busi­ness out­come and val­ues. The team has high turnover, the team is not ener­gized or not engaged, just so we need you to get in there.”

And it was one of those unplanned things for me. So it was chal­leng­ing in that I did­n’t see myself doing it. I did it because those around me encour­aged me. They said, ​“Look, you real­ly need to do this to stretch your­self, demon­strate your skills, but also you’ll look back and be thank­ful for nav­i­gat­ing that chal­lenge.” And they were right. I mean, what it did is because it was kind of a super tech­ni­cal role in a space that I did­n’t know much about, it helped me learn. But it also helped give vis­i­bil­i­ty to the abil­i­ty to man­age through some tech­ni­cal chal­lenges, man­age through dif­fi­cult stake­hold­er sit­u­a­tions. And it real­ly did open up doors from a career pro­gres­sion stand­point in my own jour­ney that prob­a­bly would­n’t have been open if I had­n’t been pushed into that role.

Nel­son-Rowe:

So build con­fi­dence as well?

Sprunk:

For sure. I think many folks can find them­selves in roles where they say, ​“Gosh, how did I get here? And am I real­ly equipped to do this?” Some­times it’s called the imposter syn­drome, things like that. And I think any­one at times can feel that. I know I sure­ly have. And I think what I’ve learned along the way is lean into that a lit­tle bit, kind of lean into that self-doubt to moti­vate me, myself. But also some­times you just got to fake it till you make it and not let on that you might not know exact­ly what you’re doing at any moment in time, but as long as you’re open to adapt. And what I said before about the plan is the plan until the plan changes. You might have a great tra­jec­to­ry and then you learn more data or learn some more things and you have to kind of revise.

Nel­son-Rowe:

Great. What’s been your best career or pro­fes­sion­al deci­sion to date and what went into that deci­sion making?

Sprunk:

Well, inter­est­ing thing, and there’s two that come to mind. I men­tioned that I’ve not real­ly hopped a lot of jobs, but one of the oppor­tu­ni­ties that came about, gosh, over 15 years ago, and I’m still in Mil­wau­kee as a result of it, but I was help­ing out with an ASUG endeav­or. I’ve long been a vol­un­teer with ASUG and my sort of area of focus is around orga­ni­za­tion­al change man­age­ment train­ing and super users and those kinds of things. And I’d spent 10 years doing that kind of work with, like I said, count­less Go-Lives. And there was a com­pa­ny ear­ly on in their jour­ney around trans­for­ma­tion and SAP deploy­ments. And they asked for some help. They had heard me speak at an ASUG ses­sion and they’d asked for some help around estab­lish­ing a super user pro­gram and kind of refram­ing some change man­age­ment stuff. And ulti­mate­ly that vol­un­teer help, that con­nec­tion with a com­pa­ny, led to an offer of a job like, ​“Hey, you helped us a lit­tle bit. You shared some of your expe­ri­ences. We think you might actu­al­ly be real­ly good to help us in our con­tin­ued journey.”

And, I mean, that, it pre­cip­i­tat­ed an unplanned move from Chica­go to Mil­wau­kee. And so here I am some 16 years lat­er still in Mil­wau­kee kind of as a direct result of that ASUG shar­ing of my own expe­ri­ences and then an unex­pect­ed career door open­ing as a result.

Nel­son-Rowe:

You were need­ed and valued.

Sprunk:

Yeah.

Nel­son-Rowe:

Is there any­thing in your career, your pro­fes­sion­al times and places, that you’d like to do over? And if so, why?

Sprunk:

Well, I think some­times stress of the unknown can man­i­fest itself. And just being impa­tient, at least for me, I’m dri­ven, I like to get things accom­plished, move quick­ly. I think some­times when the plan around you changes and you have no con­trol of that plan, it can cre­ate stress. So I think being open to being a lit­tle bit patient to let things unfold is prob­a­bly a good thing. I think espe­cial­ly in the tech­nol­o­gy realm where some­times there’s deci­sions that are made well beyond your con­trol or sphere of influ­ence around, ​“Hey, we’re going a dif­fer­ent direc­tion with the plat­form.” Or, ​“Hey we’re not going to do that upgrade. We’re going to actu­al­ly just ride on this bus until as long as we can.” Or just oth­er things like that. And so I think ret­ro­spec­tive­ly just being patient kind of influ­ences the sit­u­a­tion and maybe rec­og­niz­ing when the sit­u­a­tion or the deci­sions are so fixed that they can’t be changed. So it’s just kind of, again, a patience and per­se­ver­ance to try dif­fer­ent angles of influ­ence and then rec­og­niz­ing when’s enough enough.

Nel­son-Rowe:

When it’s out of your con­trol and you got to move on. What job, if any, did you want and you nev­er got it? And what was that les­son learned?

Sprunk:

Yeah, I used to think the world was a super big place and I’ve learned that it real­ly is not. And it’s not because, well, you can trav­el any­where, but also, for me, you fig­ure out the peo­ple are pret­ty much wired in a sim­i­lar way. And for a while there I thought that I want­ed to go to a dif­fer­ent orga­ni­za­tion because they just had a lot of appeal to me and I put my hat in the ring and did­n’t get it and then that orga­ni­za­tion changed their focus and it was like, oh that’s a good thing. I did­n’t get that. And then I was asked a cou­ple years lat­er to con­sid­er doing that change again and ah, my gut just said no, my gut said not a good thing. So I guess the moral of that for me is some­times things on the sur­face of it look like they might be a real­ly great move but lis­ten­ing to your gut and kind of check­ing around and makes it a dif­fer­ent outcome.

And I guess the oth­er point of the world is not as big of a place as it once seemed – the SAP com­mu­ni­ty or SAP prac­ti­tion­ers is actu­al­ly pret­ty small. I found that I’ve been in the SAP ecosys­tem for just about 26 or so years and you cross paths some­what repeat­ed­ly or reg­u­lar­ly with folks that are work­ing on the same thing or doing the same thing as you might be doing in your own shop. So I’ve kind of learned it’s impor­tant to keep con­struc­tive rela­tion­ships. It’s good to have a net­work. The broad­er SAP glob­al com­mu­ni­ty real­ly isn’t that big.

Nel­son-Rowe:

It’s fas­ci­nat­ing because the port­fo­lio of solu­tions at SAP is quite large, quite wide, broad, but the com­mu­ni­ty of experts, I’ve heard it before is, it’s not a closed com­mu­ni­ty but it’s a small­er-than-you-might antic­i­pate com­mu­ni­ty. You’ve expressed appre­ci­a­tion through the con­ver­sa­tion so far for train­ing, edu­ca­tion, devel­op­ment and con­tributed to that. What type of edu­ca­tion train­ing has been essen­tial to your pro­fes­sion­al career?

Sprunk:

One, I learned that in order to be a tech­ni­cal expert, it’s hard to be a tech­ni­cal expert if you’re not a busi­ness process expert. Said dif­fer­ent­ly, when you think about sup­port­ing a busi­ness func­tion, I mean tech­nol­o­gy exists to make the busi­ness more effec­tive, to make the folks that are run­ning the busi­ness more effec­tive to ulti­mate­ly gen­er­ate more income or have a big­ger impact for the pur­pose of the busi­ness. And the tech­nol­o­gy’s all about enabling that. I kind of have an opin­ion now that you can’t be the best tech­nol­o­gy prac­ti­tion­er if you don’t have a pret­ty good or ide­al­ly real­ly good under­stand­ing of the busi­ness process, the busi­ness func­tion, the busi­ness sys­tem that you’re work­ing on sup­port­ing. And so through my career, find­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties to learn the busi­ness process and ide­al­ly teach the busi­ness process because I do believe if you can teach it, it does demon­strate that you fig­ured out how to mas­ter it.

Because you get these ques­tions from folks; they’ll ask you ques­tions that stump you and you’ve got to go fig­ure them out and you get smarter. So busi­ness process train­ing, that busi­ness acu­men, is kind of one thing that comes to mind.

The oth­er one, from more of a ​“how” per­spec­tive. ​“The Sev­en Habits of High­ly Effec­tive Peo­ple” have been one of those, I’d say, cen­ter­pieces of for­mal edu­ca­tion for me. I became a sev­en habits, Franklin Cov­ey facil­i­ta­tor because I want­ed to be able to walk the walk and talk the talk there. But that sev­en habits cur­ricu­lum helped find that there are things that are in your con­trol and then you find that there’s some­times things that are not in your sphere of con­trol. They’re not in your sphere of influ­ence. They’re sim­ply beyond any­thing that you can imme­di­ate­ly or direct­ly affect. I think the pri­ma­ry piece from Sev­en Habits is kind of know where you want to go. This notion of first things first, where do you want to get to. Have a bit of a plan in a strate­gic sense.

Nel­son-Rowe:

That’s great. And you’re a con­tin­u­al learn­er, I can tell that. You men­tioned at least one men­tor. Is there a par­tic­u­lar piece of advice that a men­tor impart­ed to you over the course of your career that’s had a great impact and longevity?

Sprunk:

I’ve had a num­ber of real­ly good men­tors through the years, and I’d say they’ve been organ­ic men­tors in that they’ve nat­u­ral­ly occurred, they’ve not been sought out like a men­tor-mentee rela­tion­ship. I find some­times when those things are tried to be con­struct­ed unnat­u­ral­ly, they don’t work so well. So my men­tors have usu­al­ly been col­leagues or man­agers or just oth­er folks in orga­ni­za­tions. I’d say the best pieces of advice that I’ve got­ten have to do with being chal­lenged and tak­ing risks. You real­ly don’t get to stand still. If you stand still, the world around you evolves. So effec­tive­ly as the world around you evolves, if you’re not evolv­ing too, you’re actu­al­ly get­ting behind. So this notion of there’s no stand­ing still, you’re either grow­ing or you’re regress­ing, came from some of those men­tor conversations.

I’m always be open to risk. You got to con­tin­ue to read and explore and learn. I’ve been super lucky to be able to have the auton­o­my to con­tin­ue to inno­vate with my team. So we do lots of stuff these days with some good tech­nolo­gies and some APIs and some data algo­rithms and oth­er stuff. And all of those out­comes are because I was taught to take risks and to con­tin­ue to read and try to inno­vate and stay ahead of the pace of change around you.

Nel­son-Rowe:

So your next light­ning round ques­tion, you’ve kind of danced around it and hint­ed at it, but if you could syn­the­size those three things that you’ve learned from being in IT and work­ing with SAP sys­tems that peo­ple should know.

Sprunk:

Plan for change and then don’t be sur­prised when your planned changes don’t hap­pen, but changes hap­pens any­way. So change is a con­stant, every­body says this, I don’t know if the pace of change is any more extreme or faster than it’s ever been. I was­n’t here 100 years ago, so I assume it’s faster. It feels faster for sure, but maybe it’s just the way it is. Lean into the change.

I think today I would add the best data wins the game. Data for me has emerged as the blood of any orga­ni­za­tion or any machine or any game you’re going to play or busi­ness pur­suit you’re going to have. And I’ve come to the point where I believe that those with the best data will win the game. What­ev­er game’s being played, what­ev­er busi­ness pur­suit or rev­enue attain­ment goals, data wins. And so I think in today’s world, focus­ing on data and how to acquire the data or assim­i­late the data, con­sume the data, apply the data, super important.

Last­ly, it’s all about the peo­ple and the teams that you’re a part of or around. I’d say sur­round your­self, nur­ture and grow the best team that you can. If you nur­ture and grow the best team that you can, you’ll have the best out­comes. So I real­ly believe that find­ing ways to grow, nur­ture, recruit, retain, inspire folks around you, your team, super important.

Nel­son-Rowe:

Clear­ly, you’re inspi­ra­tional and pas­sion­ate, but why are you so pas­sion­ate about what you do?

Sprunk:

I like to make things sim­pler and bet­ter for the space that I’m work­ing on. My gen­er­al approach is if I’m asked to do some­thing or if I’m work­ing on a par­tic­u­lar part of an org or a thing, I want to leave it bet­ter than I found it. I want to make it bet­ter so that I can look back and say, ​“Ah, that was the clut­ter, that was the mess in the room. It’s neater now.” It does­n’t mean it’s per­fect, it just is bet­ter than I found it. So I’m always moti­vat­ed to help and make things bet­ter than the state that I found them in.

Nel­son-Rowe:

Is there a cer­tain sit­u­a­tion or a cer­tain achieve­ment, a cer­tain point of progress in your pro­fes­sion­al life, that you are most proud of? And if so, why?

Sprunk:

That’s a tough one. I mean, there’s been a few roles through the years that I’m super proud of what we were able to accom­plish, some roles that pushed me to learn and do things dif­fer­ent­ly. The role that I’m in these days was anoth­er one of those out­comes of doing some­thing that I did­n’t think I want­ed to do, doing some­thing that I real­ly had nev­er thought about doing. But I’ve land­ed in a role that puts me into a busi­ness func­tion. So I’m not in IT but I use tech­nol­o­gy and I inno­vate with tech­nol­o­gy and my team devel­ops tech­nol­o­gy every sin­gle day in part­ner­ship with IT, but work­ing on a busi­ness thing. So I’d say super proud of being able to piv­ot into an adja­cent, some would say com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent line of work and going a lit­tle bit deep in terms of exper­tise on a par­tic­u­lar busi­ness func­tion. I would­n’t have kind of thought I would’ve done that, but it’s work­ing out real­ly, real­ly well.

Nel­son-Rowe:

And you took your own advice to heart, learn the busi­ness, gain busi­ness acu­men. If you could change one thing or a few things about infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy and SAP prod­ucts and solu­tions, what would that be?

Sprunk:

Well, I think being patient to rec­og­nize that things are always evolv­ing. So I think for those that may have been in tech­nol­o­gy a while, you’ve seen the tran­si­tion from main­frame to client serv­er. You’ve seen the tran­si­tion from dis­parate sys­tems into ERP is a way to go. You’ve seen now a tran­si­tion into a world of com­pos­able APIs and best of breed and things like that. So I’d say the advice there is to be patient and have a vision for what suc­cess looks like. I used to think that the big cruise ship mod­el was the way to go. In oth­er words, you had these big focus teams focused on the ERP sys­tem, whether it was an imple­men­ta­tion of the ERP sys­tem or an upgrade of the ERP sys­tem, but it was kind of like you had the sin­gle big cruise ship with these ports of calls and the ports of calls were like Go-Lives.

The sea isn’t filled with just one cruise ship. It’s filled with all kinds of boats. There’s all kinds of dif­fer­ent sys­tems and some boats are big, some boats are swollen, they all got to sail at the same time. Some­times you got salt water, you got fresh water. So the world is a lot more com­plex than it used to be. So I’d say for me, think­ing about the water is kind of like the data or the APIs that kind of con­nects every­thing and kind of just refram­ing and being flu­id or flex­i­ble with what was once a rigid mindset.

Cer­tain­ly today it’s proven that you’ve got to have dif­fer­ent sys­tems. Some of these sys­tems can be real­ly pur­pose-built and do some­thing real­ly, real­ly well. Got to have a real­ly good core ERP at the cen­ter of it. And most impor­tant­ly, you’ve got to have a way to con­sume all that data to make sense of everything.

Nel­son-Rowe:

What are the most help­ful resources that you’ve used either from ASUG, from SAP, or from oth­er organizations?

Sprunk:

Well, maybe it’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly a resource, it’s the con­nec­tion. It’s the net­work­ing. From lit­er­al­ly the first year of my SAP career up until cur­rent days, I’ve been able to use the net­work with­in ASUG to find folks who have done what I’m try­ing to do, to talk about what I’m try­ing to do, to share what I’ve done, to hear what oth­ers have done. So the biggest fea­ture or capa­bil­i­ty of the ASUG prod­uct, if you will, has been the abil­i­ty to just con­nect with oth­ers who are in the same trench that I find myself in. Because it’s some­times real­ly com­fort­ing to know that some­body’s done this before. Some­body else has fig­ured out how to nav­i­gate or dig out of this trench or make their way through the stormy waters. So for me, the com­mu­ni­ty and the net­work­ing aspects of ASUG have been instrumental.

Nel­son-Rowe:

And toward what’s made you suc­cess­ful in your career, what are the three best pieces of advice that you’d give to those who are either con­tem­plat­ing a career in IT and SAP, maybe ready for a piv­ot or well along?

Sprunk:

I think it goes back to kind of the busi­ness thing. Learn the busi­ness process. Under­stand the end to end. Don’t just be kind of the tech geek. Be a deep expert in a par­tic­u­lar line of busi­ness. Find some busi­ness prac­ti­tion­ers that might not be as tech­ni­cal­ly savvy as you are and share and kind of ideate togeth­er. But I think again, real­ly get­ting into the busi­ness and under­stand­ing how the busi­ness that you’re a part of works and once you have that sort of end-to-end under­stand­ing, it helps, I think, reframe how you approach the tech­nol­o­gy side of your job.

Nel­son-Rowe:

Think dif­fer­ent­ly from the busi­ness per­spec­tive. Okay. Jason, we’ve come to that last ques­tion and are you ready for it? If you could have one super­pow­er to be bet­ter at what you do now or bet­ter at points through­out your career and even more suc­cess­ful than you’ve already been, what would that super pow­er be?

Sprunk:

That’s a tough one and I thought a lit­tle bit about it. I think maybe time trav­el, time trav­el to kind of pop for­ward, maybe pop back. I think rec­og­niz­ing that none of us are per­fect, we’re all human. Then there’s times that I think if we had the chance to maybe slow down or reframe things, we’d have con­ver­sa­tions a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ent­ly or we’d maybe give dif­fer­ent advice or maybe we’d thank some­body in a dif­fer­ent way in terms of the impact that they’d had on our lives or our careers. So I think the super­pow­er of time trav­el would be real­ly cool.

A hun­dred years from now or 200 years from now, you kind of won­der how all of these inno­va­tions and quan­tum com­put­ing and dif­fer­ences in trav­el and modal­i­ties and all that fun stuff, you kind of won­der how it all is going to shake out. And for me, I’ve got the three boys and I want the world to be a bet­ter place and a fun­ner place and a sim­pler place and a thriv­ing place. So you kind of won­der for me what that will all look like. So I guess the super­pow­er there is some time travel.

Nel­son-Rowe:

Time trav­el. And who knows, it might hap­pen in some way, shape, or form. Great idea. So thank you, Jason, for join­ing us here at ASUG Talks. Your can­did career con­ver­sa­tion was great, and I hope our audi­ence will enjoy it as well. And we’ll talk again soon. Thank you for par­tic­i­pat­ing in ASUG Talks, Jason.

Sprunk:

Lau­rel, thank you very much again for the oppor­tu­ni­ty to speak with you and I had a great time. Thank you.