Inspire inno­va­tion, acknowl­edge chal­lenges, and share prac­ti­cal lessons from cus­tomers and SAP experts in cloud migra­tions. That’s Timo Elliott’s plan in his ses­sion dur­ing the August ASUG Best Prac­tices: SAP for Cloud conference.

For Elliott, SAP Glob­al Inno­va­tion Evan­ge­list, the August vir­tu­al event pro­vides the oppor­tu­ni­ty to trace broad busi­ness, tech­nol­o­gy, and indus­try trends; present lessons learned in peo­ple and prac­ti­cal process; and empha­size the impor­tance that peers and ASUG mem­ber con­nec­tions can play in SAP solu­tion imple­men­ta­tions and success. 

ASUG recent­ly con­nect­ed with Elliott to get an ear­ly view of his ses­sion. An edit­ed ver­sion of the full inter­view fol­lows. For con­fer­ence infor­ma­tion and reg­is­tra­tion, vis­it https://​www​.asug​.com/​e​v​e​n​t​s​/​a​s​u​g​-​b​e​s​t​-​p​r​a​c​t​i​c​e​s​-​s​a​p​-​f​o​r​-​cloud.

Ques­tion: What do you plan to bring to the audi­ence at the SAP-ASUG Cloud Con­fer­ence this year?

Answer: I am an inno­va­tion evan­ge­list for SAP, so my role involves work­ing with orga­ni­za­tions on the lead­ing edge of inno­va­tion, gath­er­ing the lessons learned, and then try­ing to share that with as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble so that we can all be more successful.

Q: As an evan­ge­list, do you have a spe­cial focus area?

A: My job is to try and help pro­vide an overview of the big trends and how we can help. Mov­ing to the cloud is one of the biggest trends. In par­tic­u­lar, I do a lot of evan­ge­lism about inno­va­tion and the SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form. And recent­ly, I’ve been involved with the SAP Inno­va­tion Awards. It’s a pro­gram where we invite orga­ni­za­tions to explain how they have been trans­form­ing their busi­ness with tech­nol­o­gy in their own words. My pre­sen­ta­tion at the con­fer­ence use many real-world cas­es — what peo­ple are actu­al­ly doing, the lessons learned, and advice to others. 

Q: How about some hints about those real-world busi­ness cas­es of inno­va­tion and a few of those lessons learned? 

A: I’ll be start­ing with the big trends. For exam­ple, IDC has said this is the year tech­nol­o­gy archi­tec­ture becomes busi­ness archi­tec­ture. We’ve heard it for sev­er­al years — every orga­ni­za­tion is becom­ing a tech­nol­o­gy orga­ni­za­tion, being more flex­i­ble, and being able to inno­vate faster with a busi­ness tech­nol­o­gy plat­form that’s inevitably run­ning on cloud technology. 

And think about dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion. It’s less about a par­tic­u­lar tech­nol­o­gy and more about turn­ing inno­va­tion into a busi­ness process that can be opti­mized, where you learn and con­stant­ly improve and do things better.

Q: Will there be par­tic­u­lar busi­ness­es or indus­tries that you’ll focus on?

A: It will be cross-indus­try and focused on gen­er­al business/​IT themes. With all the cus­tomers I talk to, I see three themes that are par­tic­u­lar­ly big right now:

One is sus­tain­abil­i­ty. It’s a new theme that has been around for a while, but it’s becom­ing more urgent, and orga­ni­za­tions want to do more. Even reluc­tant orga­ni­za­tions are going to do a lot more because cus­tomers want more sus­tain­able prod­ucts, employ­ees want to work for more sus­tain­able enter­pris­es, and gov­ern­ments are putting in place sticks and car­rots to ensure peo­ple do the right thing. Even investors are respond­ing by valu­ing com­pa­nies based on their sus­tain­abil­i­ty, which ulti­mate­ly fil­ters through to the bonus­es of all the key executives.

Every com­pa­ny I’ve talked to talks about how sus­tain­abil­i­ty is a big and grow­ing part of their strat­e­gy. Ulti­mate­ly, it’s about build­ing sus­tain­abil­i­ty into core deci­sion process­es. For exam­ple, we’re work­ing with one of the world’s biggest food and bev­er­age com­pa­nies. They’re fac­ing new plas­tic tax­es and reg­u­la­tions. So, they want to give all that infor­ma­tion to their design­ers so they can make the for­ward-look­ing choic­es about materials.

The sec­ond theme I see is arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. There are many great real-world exam­ples of peo­ple using it to auto­mate com­plex process­es and get rid of all those repet­i­tive deci­sions that typ­i­cal­ly are the most tedious parts of peo­ple’s jobs. The most inter­est­ing involve aug­ment­ed intel­li­gence, where peo­ple and com­put­ers work togeth­er for more opti­mal out­comes. For exam­ple, there’s a lot of uncer­tain­ty out there, and peo­ple are com­bin­ing algo­rithms with expert knowl­edge to try to reduce uncer­tain­ty by look­ing at dif­fer­ent sce­nar­ios of what might hap­pen and fig­ur­ing out the most opti­mal choic­es. Sus­tain­abil­i­ty is one of the cas­es for this: Of all the things we could choose to do, what’s the best option to opti­mize prof­its and the planet?

The third theme is busi­ness user empow­er­ment. One of the biggest bar­ri­ers to inno­vat­ing faster has been the divide between IT peo­ple and busi­ness­peo­ple. But increas­ing­ly, thanks to arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and the cloud and these oth­er tech­nolo­gies, there’s a fan­tas­tic oppor­tu­ni­ty to let busi­ness­peo­ple do more of the inno­va­tion them­selves in their area of exper­tise, with­out IT and tech­nol­o­gy being a bot­tle­neck — but in a gov­erned envi­ron­ment. And with robot­ic process automa­tion and new low-code/no-code solu­tions, we’ve got some fan­tas­tic exam­ples of orga­ni­za­tions start­ing to deploy these technologies.

Gart­ner con­tends that up to 80% of tech­nol­o­gy inno­va­tion will be done by ​“cit­i­zen tech­nol­o­gists” in the years to come – peo­ple who weren’t hired to do tech­nol­o­gy devel­op­ment but are increas­ing­ly respon­si­ble for extend­ing exist­ing process­es and cre­at­ing new ones. The hard part, of course, is enabling that and giv­ing up some con­trol while mak­ing sure that we don’t end up with Franken­stein mon­sters where each busi­ness goes and does its own thing, and you end up with com­plete chaos.

Q: Will you be talk­ing about SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Platform?

A: In gen­er­al, I’ll be talk­ing about how our cus­tomers have done cool things, and by the way, they’re using SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form. I’ll men­tion what parts of the plat­form they have used to do what­ev­er they’ve been work­ing on.

Q: What are a cou­ple of the lessons learned you plan to share?

A: Over the last cou­ple of years, I’ve done a series of inter­views called ​“Bet­ter Togeth­er,” where we dis­cuss projects and what could have gone bet­ter. Three things make the top of the list. The first is data: peo­ple vast­ly under­es­ti­mate how long it will take them to get the data togeth­er to inno­vate effec­tive­ly. So to take a big step for­ward, orga­ni­za­tions find they have to take a small step back and fix some of that plumb­ing. It’s not very glam­orous, but once you’ve done that, it makes it much eas­i­er to do things like imple­ment arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence algorithms. 

Q: You need clean data and trust­ed data?

A: Right. If you have large quan­ti­ties of high-qual­i­ty data, it’s quite quick and easy to put in place these algo­rithms. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, a vast major­i­ty of com­pa­nies find they don’t have that in place. 

The sec­ond area is process. Orga­ni­za­tions have the tech­nol­o­gy, but you actu­al­ly have to inte­grate the tech­nol­o­gy into a busi­ness process for any­thing to hap­pen. We’re pret­ty good at doing that for the big process­es that every­body knows SAP for — pur­chase-to-pay, hire-to-retire, etc. But the vast major­i­ty of work hap­pens in much small­er, ad hoc types of busi­ness process­es. That’s where the new busi­ness user empow­er­ment comes in, and it must be part of a big­ger rethink of how process­es are cre­at­ed and stan­dard­ized in the organization.

And the last, of course, is peo­ple. Undoubt­ed­ly, peo­ple are the most impor­tant, intel­li­gent ​“inno­va­tion tech­nol­o­gy” inside orga­ni­za­tions. Some­times I try and explain it to IT orga­ni­za­tions by say­ing, ​“Look, for­get that it’s a per­son. Imag­ine it’s a robot — every time a busi­ness user access­es the sys­tem, they active­ly add val­ue to any­thing they’re doing, assess­ing the infor­ma­tion, and mak­ing deci­sions. So you should con­sid­er them part of your infor­ma­tion infra­struc­ture.” And that means orga­ni­za­tions need to think about and invest in opti­miz­ing that ​“tech­nol­o­gy.” So train­ing and cul­tur­al change and orga­ni­za­tion and incen­tives are all real­ly impor­tant. Inevitably, when dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion goes wrong, peo­ple are under­in­vest­ed in this area. 

Q: Maybe we can make some headway?

A: I’m a hope­less opti­mist because tech­nol­o­gy’s always improv­ing. I know it some­times feels like we don’t get bet­ter at these things but the real­i­ty is we absolute­ly do — it’s just that busi­ness­es then move on to the next lev­el of com­plex­i­ty and the next lev­el of things they want to do. I some­times use the anal­o­gy that we’re walk­ing up a down esca­la­tor. We have to keep walk­ing up just to stay still in terms of the expec­ta­tions of the business.

Q: If there is one idea you want the audi­ence to walk away with, in your hope­less opti­mistic mode, what would that be?

A: Ulti­mate­ly, the biggest take­away is since ASUG orga­nizes this event, please take advan­tage of the SAP com­mu­ni­ty because it is out there, and it is a mas­sive ecosys­tem. There are peo­ple out there in your indus­try and line of busi­ness who have already thought about the future, tack­led these kinds of prob­lems, and made mis­takes that you don’t have to repeat! And so please lever­age the user group and all the oth­er com­mu­ni­ty oppor­tu­ni­ties so that we can all do bet­ter — improv­ing cus­tomer out­comes, cut­ting costs, and help­ing make the world a bet­ter place!