In this first episode of ASUG Talks: Can­did Career Con­ver­sa­tions, sea­son 2, we talk with Tim Nguyen, con­sul­tant for the SAP S/4HANA Dig­i­tal Trans­for­ma­tion Project. Tim dis­cussed his path to becom­ing a SAP professional. 

ASUG Talks Host Lau­rel Nelson-Rowe:

I am joined today on ASUG Talks by Tim Nguyen, who is a con­sul­tant for the SAP S/4HANA Dig­i­tal Trans­for­ma­tion Project and project mem­ber of the PMO at the Nava­jo Trib­al Util­i­ty Author­i­ty or NTUA. Thank you, Tim, for join­ing us today on ASUG Talks. We’re going to have a can­did career con­ver­sa­tion, and we’re going to take a step back first. Let’s begin our con­ver­sa­tion with a lit­tle bit of your back­ground. Where did you grow up? Tell us a lit­tle bit about that, and did that affect who you became as a pro­fes­sion­al? And if so, how?

Time Nguyen:

Hel­lo and it’s a plea­sure to be here with you. To answer your ques­tion, yeah, I was born in Viet­nam and I grew up all over the world. Part of it was spent in France. I’m flu­ent in French. I’ve been in the US for 48 years now. I feel very much Amer­i­can. Since SAP is a world­wide glob­al prod­uct with a lot of peo­ple using it around the world, I sup­pose my inter­na­tion­al back­ground has been a great help.

Nel­son-Rowe:

Did you always want a career in infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy or when did that first strike you as a career path?

Nguyen:

Actu­al­ly, not real­ly. I had a degree in trans­porta­tion and man­age­ment from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas in Austin, and I was hop­ing to go to work for the air­line, but things often take an inter­est­ing turn in life and I’ve trav­eled the world lit­er­al­ly for my SAP world, SAP work rather, and there­fore I’ve been more of an air­line cus­tomer rather than an air­line exec­u­tive. But yeah, I did­n’t real­ly seek out a career in IT. It just came to me and, after 26 years doing SAP and almost 30 some years of doing IT, I guess it’s been a bless­ing and I’m hav­ing a lot of fun doing it.

Nel­son-Rowe:

What did you want to do for airlines?

Nguyen:

I prob­a­bly would be some kind of an air­line exec­u­tive over­look­ing cus­tomer ser­vice or in air­line expe­ri­ence or in sched­ul­ing or in-flight plan­ning or some­thing like that. 

Nel­son-Rowe:

But you’re a great user of air­lines anyway.

Nguyen:

I do fly them a lot, yes.

Nel­son-Rowe:

So ASUG puts togeth­er a few light­ning-round ques­tions and we ask our guests to real­ly answer ques­tions in two min­utes or less. Your first light­ning round ques­tion is to share with our audi­ence your career highlights.

Nguyen:

So I’ve been very for­tu­nate to have had a 42-year career in IT. I’ve done every­thing from build­ing my own SAP con­sult­ing com­pa­ny in the ​‘90s. I’ve led glob­al ser­vice deliv­ery when I was at Syman­tec Glob­al Ser­vice in the mid-2000s. Then when I was at EMC, I was their SAP glob­al tech­ni­cal evan­ge­list. I had the oppor­tu­ni­ty and a hand in build­ing some real­ly ground­break­ing and amaz­ing solu­tion for SAP cus­tomers around the world. I guess look­ing back, some of the high­lights would be, of course, the recent go-live that I had at NTUA on Mon­day, Novem­ber 14, 2022, when we went live with S/4HANA Util­i­ty 2021. That’s the sixth major go-live in my career and arguably the pin­na­cle of my career because it was a very com­plex project. It was some­thing that when we went into it, we did­n’t know how big it’s going to be. Obvi­ous­ly oth­er peo­ple saw how big it was, and that led to NTUA being nom­i­nat­ed and actu­al­ly win­ning the SAP Inno­va­tion Award as Util­i­ty of the Year for the Mid-Market.

Nel­son-Rowe:

So that was num­ber six, was the high­light? Will there be num­ber sev­en, num­ber eight, num­ber nine?

Nguyen:

Well, I’m not plan­ning on ful­ly retir­ing yet. I did take a brief ear­ly retire­ment when I left EMC, but that did­n’t last very long. It’s hard to tell, but yeah, it could be some more. We’ll see.

Nel­son-Rowe:

Okay. What’s been your favorite job or role or respon­si­bil­i­ty to date, and why is that your favorite?

Nguyen:

So I’ve had some real­ly inter­est­ing roles and respon­si­bil­i­ties in my career, and you could argue it’s a check­ered career actually.

Nel­son-Rowe:

Check­ered, how so?

Nguyen:

Every career has its ups and its downs. I pre­fer to think on the upside. My cur­rent role at NTUA, as a con­sul­tant for the SAP dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion project and a mem­ber of the PMO of the project man­age­ment office may be a very, very impor­tant role. As a mem­ber of the lead­er­ship team and the strat­e­gy team, we made an impact on the project and on how peo­ple do things. In fact, in this case, we had an impact on the life of the Nava­jo Nation peo­ple. So it’s actu­al­ly quite fascinating. 

My favorite role is prob­a­bly the one that I had at EMC when I was the SAP glob­al tech­ni­cal evan­ge­list there for SAP Glob­al Solu­tion. So in that role, I worked with engi­neer­ing to cre­ate mar­ket lead­ing solu­tions, and I worked with cus­tomers, help them with max­i­miz­ing their invest­ment in EMC tech­nolo­gies. I was one of the enabler of the EMC glob­al sales force to help them explain the com­pelling val­ue proposition.

Nel­son-Rowe:

Great. You allud­ed to this per­haps already in one of your answers, but what’s been the most chal­leng­ing role and respon­si­bil­i­ties? Is it the most recent go-live or another?

Nguyen:

The most recent go-live was not the big chal­lenge. It was a chal­lenge, don’t get me wrong, but it was­n’t a big chal­lenge. Peo­ple have asked me, ​“So how was it?” I say, ​“Well, arguably one of the best, if not the best of my career,” because of plan­ning that went into it. I often said that all of these go-lives are a 90% plan­ning and 10% execution.

I think the biggest chal­lenge I had was when I was asked to see if I could go to France to help EMC build the SAP busi­ness there. Again, they knew I was being able to speak French a lit­tle bit. At the time, I was telling my boss, Doug Edmonds, that yeah, I prob­a­bly could order from a French menu or lunch or din­ner, but you asked me to explain SAP in French, well, I’m not sure how that’s going to fly. If you are in France, unless you speak French flu­ent­ly, you’re not going to be very effec­tive. But I man­aged to sur­prise every­one, includ­ing myself, by actu­al­ly being able to do all of that. I could not tell you how I did it. Obvi­ous­ly, part of it is being pas­sion­ate about it, being able to enjoy doing it and believe in what you’re doing. So in the end, yes, I was able to suc­cess­ful­ly help EMC.

Nel­son-Rowe:

Tech­nol­o­gy is a lan­guage unto itself. It was almost like anoth­er language?

Nguyen:

In the world of com­plex tech­nol­o­gy like SAP, it’s about the ​‘why.’ Why would you do some­thing? It’s less about the ​‘what’ and less about the ​‘how.’ Of course there’s a how as well, but it’s about the why. When you con­nect, espe­cial­ly when you are in a mode to try to con­vince some­body to do some­thing with you, then it’s become much more of a why. Once peo­ple get it and the light bulb goes off and that’s when you get into the how. The what is just there. A lot of peo­ple talk too much about the what, but it does­n’t res­onate as to why would I want to do that? Why would I need to buy your prod­uct? Why we should do X, Y, and Z, right?

So the most suc­cess­ful peo­ple today, they talk about the why. You name it – Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, peo­ple like that – it’s all about the why. Why would you buy an iPhone, right? Many com­pa­nies make phones, But Apple’s appears to be the most suc­cess­ful of all. 

Nel­son-Rowe:

How did that expe­ri­ence in France and with the SAP tech­nol­o­gy shape you for your future roles and challenges?

Nguyen:

It just reminds me that if there is a chal­lenge, and there will always be chal­lenge in life, that you have to think cre­ative­ly out of the box and what­ev­er to over­come the chal­lenge. I guess if there’s a les­son learned, if you will, is that you want to be opti­mistic and you want try your best to get some­thing done. No guar­an­tee you’re going to suc­ceed. But if you try your best and you are opti­mistic that it’s going to work, then it’ll be fine. That’s pret­ty much the same thing with this go-live. There were numer­ous chal­lenges, but we over­come them. It was not easy, but in the end, we’re live and that’s all that matters.

Nel­son-Rowe:

You said also that this most recent expe­ri­ences, most recent go-live, ben­e­fit­ed the Nava­jo Nation. Can you talk a lit­tle bit about that?

Nguyen:

NTUA is a busi­ness of the Nava­jo Nation and it’s a pub­lic util­i­ty that serves the need of the Nava­jo peo­ple. It pro­vides elec­tric­i­ty, water, waste­water, gas and so on. So it’s been using SAP for 20-plus years and it’s run­ning on an old ver­sion ECC. It was time to move to a much more mod­ern ver­sion of prod­uct, S/4HANA, where it has much improved cus­tomer ser­vice and what­not. It has a lot of things that only S/4HANA can do with embed­ded ana­lyt­ics and AI machine learn­ing that we deployed as part of the intel­li­gent asset man­age­ment. Also, for the first time in NTUA his­to­ry, we deployed a cus­tomer ser­vice por­tal. So it real­ly changes how NTUA can ser­vice its cus­tomer and can deliv­er bet­ter ser­vice to its cus­tomer, which is most­ly the Nava­jo people.

Nel­son-Rowe:

Thank you. Per­haps we’ll talk a lit­tle bit more about that in future con­ver­sa­tions. On your edu­ca­tion and train­ing back­ground, what helped you in par­tic­u­lar as you trav­eled down your career path? 

Nguyen:

To be hon­est, SAP is not some­thing that’s taught in school. It does­n’t hurt you have a com­put­er sci­ence degree, but I did­n’t, and most peo­ple I know do not. So a for­mal edu­ca­tion is not nec­es­sar­i­ly a require­ment for suc­cess, right? I think that you would be bet­ter off find­ing a way to be part of a project or more than one if you can learn on a job. 

Nel­son-Rowe:

So project-by-project?

Nguyen:

It’s project by project, and you build your knowl­edge and your net­work, and you work, and you learn from oth­ers. In these days, in the 2022 onwards, any project that has inno­va­tion as part of its objec­tive is real­ly the best oppor­tu­ni­ty that you should pur­sue. Every­one can do a migra­tion. But in the case of NTUA, it was incred­i­ble inno­va­tion with the embed­ded ana­lyt­ics and with the intel­li­gent asset man­age­ment. Yeah, those are the sort of thing that was part of your per­son­al growth, part of your exper­tise devel­op­ment. Those are the sort of things that you want to be think­ing about.

Nel­son-Rowe:

Okay, great. Have you had men­tors across your career path? 

Nguyen:

I don’t real­ly have any real men­tor. I did have some very good man­agers. They’ve encour­aged me to think out of the box, just think dif­fer­ent­ly. And at EMC, they say just do it and ask for for­give­ness lat­er. I think in a way, that’s why is so suc­cess­ful. Things change, of course in the EMC that I used to work at, it’s no longer there. It’s now part of Dell, where the cul­ture is a lot dif­fer­ent. But the thing that I’ve always done is to think out of the box about do things a lit­tle dif­fer­ent­ly, if possible.

Nel­son-Rowe:

If pos­si­ble?

Nguyen:

It’s not always pos­si­ble because you have to have the right man­ag­er to allow you to do those sort of things.

Nel­son-Rowe:

To go ahead and do it and then ask for for­give­ness? If pos­si­ble, if you could nar­row it down, you men­tioned the word pin­na­cle before. What would be the high­light of your career?

Nguyen:

It could take a long time, but I’ll boil it down to a few, prob­a­bly three. At EMC, I think 2012 SAP HANA just came out as a data­base. EMC, because they sold stor­age prod­uct, and they sold dis­as­ter recov­ery, busi­ness con­ti­nu­ity solu­tions, how do you pro­tect an in-mem­o­ry data­base? That was kind of dif­fi­cult. So again, it’s part of my job, how do we this? Of course, when you have a stor­age com­pa­ny with stor­age tech­nolo­gies, you can pro­tect it from a tech­nol­o­gy point of view, but that does­n’t solve the real prob­lem, which is, it’s a busi­ness prob­lem. So we need­ed the par­tic­i­pa­tion of some­one who knows the busi­ness. So I had a lunch con­ver­sa­tion with a good friend of mine who works at Deloitte Con­sult­ing, and we decid­ed we’re going to put togeth­er a proof of con­cept to show that we can actu­al­ly do a dis­as­ter recov­ery for SAP HANA over long dis­tance, over hun­dreds of miles dis­tance. We called it Project Rubi­con. So if you Google Tim Nguyen EMC or Tim Nguyen SAP, it may still be out there. It’s been a few years, it’s almost 10 years now. So they may have tak­en it down, but the last time I checked about two years ago, it was still out there. So we were able to not only demon­strate that you can actu­al­ly do dis­as­ter recov­ery for HANA. This is before SAP came out with sys­tem repli­ca­tion and all that. We actu­al­ly did that. We demon­strat­ed it, and we actu­al­ly pre­sent­ed at Sap­phire, I think it was in 2012.

Nel­son-Rowe:

Ground­break­ing at the time?

Nguyen:

Yeah, ground­break­ing at the time. So that was the art of the impos­si­ble, if you will. The sec­ond high­light was when I was at Call­away. We migrat­ed from ECC on Ora­cle to HANA. We achieved a world record for migrat­ing sev­en and half ter­abyte. We pre­sent­ed this at Sap­phire in 2017. That was quite uncom­mon. It was quite incredible. 

Arguably the pin­na­cle was the recent go-live at NTUA. I say that because it’s the first and only project in my 26-year career where I par­tic­i­pat­ed from A to Z. In oth­er words, I start­ed from the dis­cov­ery process to the actu­al go-live. Most peo­ple don’t even have the oppor­tu­ni­ty. Most peo­ple come in the mid­dle, come in, start, and leave, what­ev­er. So it was unique in that sense. It was a very ambi­tious project, with five sep­a­rate work­stream, every­thing from a com­plete refresh of the infra­struc­ture to build out a pri­vate cloud to the migra­tion to S/4HANA, using Fiori as a pri­ma­ry inter­face to the imple­men­ta­tion of the cus­tomer ser­vice por­tal, of the embed­ded ana­lyt­ics and of the intel­li­gent asset man­age­ment. So, a lot there. It did­n’t seem like that big a deal when we start­ed it, when we wrote the RFP. But of course, now that look­ing back, it was a lot. I guess peo­ple noticed and that’s why NTUA was nom­i­nat­ed and actu­al­ly won.

Nel­son-Rowe:

And received the award.

Nguyen:

Yeah, the util­i­ty of the year, part of the SAP Inno­va­tion Award at the SAP4U con­fer­ence in San Diego this year.

Nel­son-Rowe:

And you say inno­va­tion made the dif­fer­ence? Yeah, I think inno­va­tion is prob­a­bly an impor­tant rea­son why NTUA won.

Nel­son-Rowe:

Sec­ond light­ning round ques­tion: If you could nar­row it down, what are the three things you’ve learned from being in this field that peo­ple should know?

Nguyen:

Basi­cal­ly, you have to net­work a lot. You have to get to know a lot of peo­ple because SAP is so wide that no one knows every­thing. You can’t. So you have to know a lot of peo­ple. The shar­ing of infor­ma­tion is absolute­ly crit­i­cal to being able to find a solu­tion. It goes two ways. So it’s a two-way street. You can’t just take infor­ma­tion, rather you have to share it back. That’s why I’m doing this today with you, right?

I think that the oth­er thing, like I said ear­li­er, is to think out of the box and think of things dif­fer­ent­ly, and then find a way to get peo­ple to agree with new ideas. Obvi­ous­ly, it’s not always easy. In fact, it’s very hard. But you find a way to get peo­ple to agree with your ideas and they sup­port it, and they evan­ge­lize it with you, then it’ll get accepted.

Nel­son-Rowe:

One of your roles that you described when we began the con­ver­sa­tion was as an evan­ge­list. So that skill set has served you well over time, correct?

Nguyen:

Well, that’s just a title that I gave myself, but-

Nel­son-Rowe:

It applies correctly.

Nguyen:

It’s part of believ­ing in what you’re doing and shar­ing that excite­ment with others.

Nel­son-Rowe:

Which leads to the next ques­tion. You are pas­sion­ate about what you do. What inspires that passion?

Nguyen:

Yeah, so I think it’s hard to say. I think it’s part of what I love to do. I think that if it helps oth­er peo­ple in achiev­ing what they want to achieve, then that that’s some­thing that is worth doing. If the end goal is some­thing that is bet­ter than what we have today, and if I can in a mean­ing­ful way con­tribute to that, then this is worth doing. So that’s where the pas­sion comes from. It’s very hard to explain that. Sure, you can be paid mon­ey, but that’s not the end all and the be all. You can be paid well, but be in a real­ly bad posi­tion, in a mis­er­able posi­tion, mis­er­able job. I’ve been there, believe me. That’s not much fun either. But I guess one thing that I could say is that, if you are for­tu­nate enough, like I have been to have boss­es who appre­ci­ate what you do and let you do it, that will then increase your lev­el of pas­sion that much more.

Nel­son-Rowe:

That sup­port­ive envi­ron­ment. As you reflect, what are you most proud of in your pro­fes­sion­al life and why? What’s that one most-proud moment or experience?

Nguyen:

Well, like I said before, it’s just a mat­ter of being bold and being brave and think out­side the box. Yeah.

Nel­son-Rowe:

Do you most love the lead­er­ship posi­tion in terms of projects and teams or the par­tic­i­pa­tion in teams that are innovative?

Nguyen:

Well, it’s real­ly nei­ther. If you are an expert, it is expect­ed that you would con­tribute your exper­tise. So you can call it lead­er­ship if you like, but it’s exper­tise. I found that at NTUA, which is quite inter­est­ing, their cul­ture is one of con­sen­sus, which is very for­eign to me actu­al­ly. I’ve nev­er been in a com­pa­ny where no one, not a boss will tell you, this is what we’re going to do. It’s always, so what do you think we’re going to do? What should we do? And it’s a con­sen­sus cul­ture. After four years there, I’ve actu­al­ly come to quite like it, but it was a big adjustment.

Nel­son-Rowe:

What are the most help­ful resources that you’ve used along the way, includ­ing ASUG resources?

Nguyen:

So ASUG has cer­tain­ly been a resource and the ASUG com­mu­ni­ty. That’s why I have been and con­tin­ue to be a vol­un­teer since I think 2012, that’s going on 10 years. So it’s a lot of demand on my time and a lot of things. But what I got out of it is immense. That’s why I’m will­ing to share and to give back as much as I can. I was the chair of the enter­prise SIG. In that capac­i­ty, I was part of the team to choose many of the ses­sions of Sap­phire. So here I was being asked to use my exper­tise to choose these ses­sions. But believe it or not, I learned a lot more from fig­ur­ing out these ses­sions than actu­al­ly even sit­ting at them. So ASUG cer­tain­ly has been a big resource.

The over­all net­work and SAP itself, if you’re an SAP cus­tomer, you may or may not know, but as part of your enter­prise sup­port, you have access to amaz­ing train­ing cours­es online. That is at no addi­tion­al cost to your com­pa­ny. These cours­es are absolute­ly fan­tas­tic. They are no charge. It’s online. Some of them are actu­al­ly live cours­es. Now, I don’t have time any­more to do those cours­es, but I would love to par­tic­i­pate in those. So yeah, explore that. There’s a resource that can real­ly be that game chang­er to allow you to obtain the exper­tise that you can’t get any­where else. Like I said, they don’t teach any­thing in school, and if they did, it would be obso­lete because it’ll take us two years to cre­ate a course. By that time, stuff is no longer relevant.

Nel­son-Rowe:

It sounds like even as you’ve put a lot of time and ener­gy into shar­ing, you’ve got­ten so much more back from it?

Nguyen:

With­out ques­tion, with­out ques­tion. This project at NTUA, a sig­nif­i­cant part of a suc­cess because of the input of our peers, the peo­ple that I reach out to, reach out and ask for opin­ions and advice and so on. With­out their insight and their lessons learned, we would­n’t be any­where where we need­ed to be.

Nel­son-Rowe:

Thanks. So third light­ning round ques­tion: What are the three best pieces of advice that you’d give those inter­est­ed in a career in IT, specif­i­cal­ly peo­ple inter­est­ed in an SAP project or journey?

Nguyen:

First, find an oppor­tu­ni­ty to be part of an indus­try project, one that has inno­va­tion in it. No sub­sti­tute for knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence gives us that. Sec­ond is try to be ​“inno­v­a­tive” to be part of a project that has inno­va­tion as part of its deliv­er­able. Again, you have to be at right place, right time. Like they say, it’s nev­er easy, nev­er sim­ple. But some­body asked me before, if I had two oppor­tu­ni­ties, which one should I choose? I say, well, I would choose the one with inno­va­tion. Even though it may be pay­ing less mon­ey but just the oppor­tu­ni­ty to grow and to learn from that, it would make up for what you’re going to be able to make in the short term.

Then the last point that we just talked about is to lever­age the com­mu­ni­ty and the net­work­ing, or this train­ing that is avail­able to you as an SAP cus­tomer, but real­ly the com­mu­ni­ty, all of the con­fer­ences. So I’ve been very for­tu­nate in my career that con­fer­ences have been an inte­gral part of my devel­op­ment – been to every Sap­phire except two. In fact, there was a real pos­si­bil­i­ty that I would actu­al­ly be miss­ing my first Sap­phire this year because it was invi­ta­tion­al only. It all worked out. I kept my streak of, I don’t know, 22 Sap­phires or some­thing like that alive.

Nel­son-Rowe:

What do you hope that the lis­ten­ers to ASUG Talks take away from our con­ver­sa­tion today?

Nguyen:

There’s a Latin proverb, I think that’s loose­ly trans­lat­ed to some­thing like for­tune favors the brave, or for­tune favors the bold, or some­thing like that. So I hope that this con­ver­sa­tion would encour­age who­ev­er’s lis­ten­ing to this to be bold, to have con­fi­dence in your­self and in the peo­ple who work with you, work around you. On occa­sion, if you’re allowed to think out­side of the box, that’s what it’s going to take to get things done.

Nel­son-Rowe:

So be bold. That’s the theme. Thank you, Tim, for the con­ver­sa­tion today, the can­did con­ver­sa­tion and your advice. We’ll check in on those next projects that you take up. Have a great rest of your day and thank you to the ASUG Talks audience.