A group of tech­nol­o­gy exec­u­tives from all types of orga­ni­za­tions across the U.S. and Cana­da gath­ered in the shad­ow of Camel­back Moun­tain in Phoenix for the ASUG Exec­u­tive Exchange Nation­al Sum­mit in Feb­ru­ary 2020. The top­ic that brought them togeth­er? Inno­va­tion and how to exe­cute it via their peo­ple, process­es, and tech­nolo­gies — whether through SAP or non-SAP solutions. 

Inno­va­tion Requires More than Just Ideas

Inno­va­tion sits at the top of the list of pri­or­i­ties at most orga­ni­za­tions, regard­less of their busi­ness or indus­try. Yet how many of those orga­ni­za­tions are tru­ly effec­tive at intro­duc­ing real inno­va­tions? We found in the ASUG Pulse of the SAP Cus­tomer 2020 study that orga­ni­za­tions are spend­ing more than twice as much time exe­cut­ing on cur­rent strate­gies than on plan­ning for the future (70% exe­cut­ing and 30% plan­ning). And only 7% of ASUG mem­bers say they belong to orga­ni­za­tions that spend more time inno­vat­ing than exe­cut­ing on cur­rent strategies. 

That num­ber shouldn’t be so low. By a show of hands, about half the atten­dees in the room indi­cat­ed that they’ll be intro­duc­ing new prod­ucts and ser­vices in 2020. Most orga­ni­za­tions don’t suf­fer from a lack of ideas — they strug­gle with how to process those ideas into real projects that add val­ue to their orga­ni­za­tions. At the heart of that strug­gle is how to pri­or­i­tize what to pur­sue, how to eval­u­ate whether those projects are suc­cess­ful, and what to do when you dis­cov­er they’re not. 

What Exact­ly Is Innovation?

Per­haps the most inter­est­ing dis­cus­sions of the week cen­tered around the def­i­n­i­tion of inno­va­tion itself. ASUG CEO Geoff Scott asked this ques­tion in his open­ing keynote, ​“The Inno­va­tion Imper­a­tive: What, Me Wor­ry?” ​“I think the word ​‘inno­va­tion’ trips us up some­times,” he said. ​“Are we talk­ing about ​‘capital‑I Inno­va­tion’ or ​‘little‑i’ inno­va­tion? When these become big projects, some­times they turn into lots of meet­ings, com­plex process­es, and big bud­gets — all while the actu­al ideas slow­ly die on the vine. Mean­while, we could be adding incre­men­tal innovations.” 

Con­ver­sa­tions with atten­dees through­out the week revealed that these exec­u­tives all have slight­ly dif­fer­ent views of what defines inno­va­tion. Some leaned toward the ​“little‑i inno­va­tion” def­i­n­i­tion that Geoff offered, where inno­va­tion is about mak­ing con­tin­u­ous improve­ment to all types of process­es and tech­nolo­gies. Oth­ers defined inno­va­tion as using IT teams and tech­nol­o­gy to deliv­er val­ue to the busi­ness, through both large and small projects. Sev­er­al exec­u­tives agreed that new advances often come from putting exist­ing things togeth­er in dif­fer­ent ways — cit­ing the exam­ple of Uber and Airbnb, nei­ther of which invent­ed any of the tech­nolo­gies they used to build their empires. A few oth­ers focused on the impor­tance of the mind­set to try new things, stay curi­ous, learn from fail­ures, and cel­e­brate when you achieve successes. 

Cre­at­ing a Cul­ture of Innovation

In his keynote, ASUG CEO Geoff Scott under­scored the impor­tance of the inno­va­tion mind­set, both at the indi­vid­ual and at the lead­er­ship lev­el. ​“You need to cre­ate a cul­ture of inno­va­tion,” he explained. ​“If risk is not reward­ed and fail­ure is not an option, then those at your orga­ni­za­tion are going to think to them­selves, ​‘I’m not even going to try.’ You need to be con­scious of your role as a leader and what you’re doing to cre­ate the right envi­ron­ment for innovation.” 

ASUG saw data to back this up in our 2019 study of SAP cus­tomers. More than half of cus­tomers (51%) told us that the lev­el of inno­va­tion at their orga­ni­za­tion affects their job sat­is­fac­tion and 44% said it affects how long they’ll stay with an employ­er. Atten­dees echoed this as they dis­cussed the impor­tance of giv­ing their teams per­mis­sion to set aside time away from their day-to-day work fight­ing fires and han­dling sup­port requests. Those who do this said that it ener­gizes their teams and dri­ves satisfaction. 

One of the pre­sen­ters shared how his team is charged with help­ing SAP become a more inno­v­a­tive orga­ni­za­tion. SAP Chief Inno­va­tion Offi­cer Max Wes­sel asked the crowd, ​“Who thinks SAP is on the bleed­ing edge of tech­nol­o­gy?” When just a few hands went up, he respond­ed with, ​“My job is deal­ing with that.” 

Find­ing Inno­va­tion in the Cloud

One of the top­ics cov­ered over the two days of pro­gram­ming was the impor­tance of hav­ing a cloud mind­set to sup­port inno­va­tion. Rob Enslin, for­mer SAP exec­u­tive and pres­i­dent of cloud sales at Google Cloud Plat­form (GCP), pre­sent­ed on inno­va­tion in the cloud with a focus on why enter­prise inno­va­tion is lag­ging con­sumer innovation. 

Despite SAP’s con­nec­tions with Microsoft through Project Embrace, GCP is mak­ing heavy invest­ments to sup­port SAP envi­ron­ments — many of which are already deployed or in devel­op­ment. Enslin laid out the key rea­sons why SAP cus­tomers should con­sid­er mov­ing to GCP as the inter­sec­tion of infra­struc­ture, inte­gra­tion, and ana­lyt­ics. ​“The process of adopt­ing the cloud can hap­pen in a mat­ter of weeks, not years,” Enslin said as he gave an overview of the steps Google takes SAP cus­tomers through to help them build a cloud strat­e­gy, pro­to­type, archi­tec­tur­al blue­print, migra­tion sequence, and phased rollouts. 

Using the Cloud to Keep the Core Clean

Edy Sardil­li of Google spoke about the oppor­tu­ni­ty to aug­ment SAP Cloud Plat­form with Google tech­nol­o­gy, decou­pling inno­va­tion from your core busi­ness process­es and keep­ing them in the cloud. He cau­tioned, ​“There are two silos in orga­ni­za­tions: Those doing SAP cloud devel­op­ment and a sep­a­rate team work­ing on cloud devel­op­ment. You don’t want a sit­u­a­tion where your SAP teams just ship data to the oth­er teams so they can build apps.”

Colleen Speer, senior VP of SAP Cloud Plat­form North Amer­i­ca, echoed the ​“keep your core clean” mes­sage and rein­forced the impor­tance of mak­ing rapid changes with the SAP Cloud Plat­form. ​“That way you can build in the cloud with­out dis­rupt­ing any­thing else,” she explained. 

SAP Cus­tomers Take on the Cloud

While the cloud may look like it’s an answer for inno­va­tion, cus­tomers in the room expressed some frus­tra­tions about the lev­el of change fatigue it caus­es with­in their orga­ni­za­tions. They explained that it has become dif­fi­cult for the busi­ness to absorb and apply these inno­va­tions as fast as they enter their tech­nol­o­gy landscapes. 

ERP indus­try ana­lyst and prin­ci­pal at Enter­prise Appli­ca­tions Con­sult­ing Joshua Green­baum tipped his hat to ASUG’s role as sup­port group as he intro­duced him­self, ​“My name is Josh and I have an inno­va­tion prob­lem. The real­i­ty is that most cus­tomers are in a sim­i­lar place and sim­ply want to have the same cool toys as their com­peti­tors.” He shared his assess­ment of where many SAP cus­tomers are in their cloud jour­neys in his pre­sen­ta­tion, ​“Hybrid in the Cloud: A New Hope or a New Headache?” He sees the neces­si­ty for cross-pol­li­na­tion between SAP and non-SAP sys­tems, giv­en that the major­i­ty of cus­tomers are work­ing in best-of-breed, mul­ti­cloud, hybrid envi­ron­ments. Green­baum wants the hyper­scalers to help solve this for cus­tomers. ​“If the real­i­ty is het­ero­ge­neous, some­one has to sup­port the cus­tomer,” Green­baum said. ​“Being able to deliv­er inno­va­tion on top of the plat­forms is crit­i­cal. Who can own the busi­ness rela­tion­ship and who can orches­trate the process?” 

Where Emerg­ing Tech­nolo­gies Fit In

David Judge, VP, SAP Intel­li­gent Enter­prise Solu­tions, pre­sent­ed on how to suc­ceed with the top-of-mind emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies: arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI), machine learn­ing, and automa­tion. He ran through the many rea­sons why AI and machine learn­ing are hav­ing dif­fi­cul­ty liv­ing up to the hype around them. 

“There’s a huge short­age of engi­neers and data sci­en­tists who can do this work. But do we even need these resources?” Judge asked. ​“And when we have them, are we using them prop­er­ly?” Yet he warned orga­ni­za­tions that are not look­ing to bet­ter under­stand AI that this func­tion­al­i­ty may be creep­ing into their tech stacks through Lines-of-Busi­ness, which could threat­en their suc­cess. He left the group with a dif­fer­ent take on the state­ment when he said, ​“AI won’t replace man­agers, but man­agers who use AI will replace those who don’t.”

Hands-On Inno­va­tion in Action

Dur­ing the week, the exec­u­tives took part in a hands-on inno­va­tion cul­ture work­shop run by Sal­ly Lawler Kennedy and Tina Tuan who are part of the SAP AppHaus team at SAP that can help you address inno­va­tion at your own com­pa­ny. They shared SAP’s answer to what defines inno­va­tion as prac­tices that opti­mize, extend, and trans­form, as well as its inno­va­tion for­mu­la: Inno­va­tion = Cre­ativ­i­ty x Exe­cu­tion. The SAP method­ol­o­gy sees five enablers to inno­va­tion: peo­ple, process, place, lead­er­ship, and technology. 

Atten­dees broke into small teams for the two-hour work­shop, col­lab­o­rat­ing on post-it exer­cis­es to iden­ti­fy the biggest chal­lenges to inno­va­tion their orga­ni­za­tions face and then what they could do to solve those chal­lenges. At the workshop’s con­clu­sion, the exec­u­tives shared what they would take back to their orga­ni­za­tions and the val­ue they saw in the process. Sev­er­al par­tic­i­pants expressed that it felt good to know their orga­ni­za­tions were not alone as they dis­cov­ered oth­ers faced many of the same hur­dles. A few com­ment­ed that they real­ized the impor­tance of hav­ing a plan for inno­va­tion and that no sin­gle depart­ment can own inno­va­tion, which comes in many shapes and forms. 

What’s Work­ing to Dri­ve Innovation

Despite the strug­gles the atten­dees dis­cussed, many in the room also report­ed progress in their efforts to inno­vate at their orga­ni­za­tions. One exec­u­tive described how a recent orga­ni­za­tion­al restruc­ture around the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence was mak­ing a big dif­fer­ence. Oth­ers talked about how they were incen­tiviz­ing not only their teams, but also their third-par­ty part­ners based on how they’re con­tribut­ing to inno­va­tion. All agreed on the impor­tance of the syn­er­gy between IT and the busi­ness through­out the inno­va­tion journey. 

Peo­ple Are Your Innovators

One SAP cus­tomer that has suc­cess­ful­ly bro­ken down the bar­ri­ers between IT and the rest of the busi­ness, New Eng­land Bio­labs, shared their sto­ry dur­ing the pan­el dis­cus­sion ​“How Does Your Orga­ni­za­tion View Inno­va­tion?” Sharon Kaiser, ASUG board mem­ber and CIO of New Eng­land Bio­labs, and Mau­rice South­worth, exec­u­tive direc­tor of pro­duc­tion, explained how they broke down bar­ri­ers while going through the process of mov­ing from a busi­ness dri­ven by sci­en­tif­ic trib­al knowl­edge to dig­i­tal­ly enabled process­es sup­port­ed by SAP ERP. ​“We had a big change man­age­ment issue,” Kaiser said. ​“We have sci­en­tists who have been work­ing with us since the 1970s. I had to con­vince them to adopt SAP when they kept telling me, ​‘I hate SAP.’” 

For New Eng­land Bio­labs, the focus is on the peo­ple. South­worth men­tioned the impor­tance of the hir­ing process. ​“We’re look­ing for peo­ple who want to get embed­ded into our cul­ture, not just come in and do their jobs and go home,” he said. ​“Don’t hire quick­ly. We find it’s easy to find skilled peo­ple but hard­er to find peo­ple with pas­sion who are a good fit.”

Inno­va­tion proved to be a rich top­ic to explore at the 2020 ASUG Exec­u­tive Exchange Nation­al Sum­mit. Expect to hear more about this top­ic through the region­al Exec­u­tive Exchange events planned through­out the year. ASUG mem­bers can log in and add Exec­u­tive Exchange to their pro­files to fol­low future events.