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choirshark
Advisor
Advisor
1,308
Charles Dickens said in "A tale of Two Cities":

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”


I cannot imagine what it is like these days to make a selection for an ERP system. It is the best of times, because you literally have 1000 of sites and sources delivering information instantly and free of charge. It is the worst of times exactly for the same reasons. In a time, where competence and experience are being substituted by fame and acclamation as criteria for credibility in the "interwebs" and social media universes, it must be extremely difficult to find trusted information to make a selection you can feel sure about. The last 24 months of quarantines and restrictions have not made things easier, since the face to face on-site interactions like design thinking sessions, requirement definitions and architectural white-boarding with experts have been reduced to a minimum.

What to do?

I believe that the SAP community with now more than 3 million registered users can add a lot of value here. Today, this is mostly a place where people come with product related questions to get answers and advice from SAP, but also from peers, partners and experts from across the globe. In the consumer marketplace, it has long become standard practice to rely on peer reviews, crowd-sourced how-to videos and user communities to add to the value proposition of the products and make people feel secure in their choice before they actually commit to buying a product.

While ERP is not a consumer product, and will never be purchased with a credit-card swipe at the spur of the moment, many aspects of consumer product communities can be applied. We believe that there is much potential to make the SAP Community Network more attractive for potential buyers to join the SAP community in the selection process: be it new buyers for ERP or existing customers evaluating a move to a new solution or looking to expand their solution coverage. It is a WWW (Win-Win-Win) scenario:

Win for Prospects: They can see what questions are being asked by other companies, making their selection process potentially more robust

Win for Partners: They can attach to relevant threads and show their competence relative to a problem, industry or solution are at hand.

Win for SAP. We can see evaluation questions at a global level and can orchestrate conversations with the relevant experts in an informal, low pressure, self-service process that allows the evaluation to occur at the pace the customer chooses

I might be wrong, but having seen the ERP buying process evolve over the past 20 years, I believe the SAP community is one of the strongest elements of the value proposition of becoming an SAP customer. But I am sure, there are many things we can do better from a content, interaction and format perspective. I'd like to learn about your thoughts.

What do you think? How can we make the SAP community even stronger when it comes to helping you make your selection for the ERP solution scope that is right for you?

I look forward to your comments

 

 

 

 
13 Comments
Marliz
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
Thanks for the insightful post, christian.horak! I am also curious about what we can do at SAP to better harness the power of SAP Community. I will stay posted to hear what's suggested by the community, for the community.
choirshark
Advisor
Advisor
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Hi Marliz

I am also curious. One of the first things I could see us doing is to not only post about what's new with the solutions, but create a resource guide for buyers of various levels of experience. Like first-time buyer, experienced buyer, and then list the best demo, best paper etc. In that way the community could act a little bit like like a librarian works in a large library. justin_borders maybe this is something you can write a comment about. uwe.erdtmann maybe we could do a survey around the topic of most relevant questions a new member in the community would ask about selecting an ERP solution.

 

 

Marliz
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
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michael.deller2 sabine.rau jakob.schneller xiaohua.wang
choirshark
Advisor
Advisor
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Thanks Marliz

Colleagues, see the post above. I am interested in discussing, and hearing from partners and customers as well on how we can make the community more valuable as trusted resource for detail content that is important for making a solid decision on which ERP solution to chose.
Jelena_Perfiljeva
Active Contributor
Not killing the community systemically since 2016 would be a good start. But I suspect it's a bit too late now as many active contributors have already left and there is no reason for them to come back.

Everyone proudly mentions millions of registered members but is there an actual Community? Do these members participate actively? Do they contribute something worth reading/using? Can anyone name any new prominent Community members after 2016? The average age of Influencers must be 45+.

The blog post says "questions are being asked by other companies". "Companies" don't post questions on SCN, people do. And I don't think there are many questions about which ERP to use. It's more like "which API can I call to achieve X" or "what is a good design for Y". And quite a few questions do not have any answers. Some tags for new products are "patroled" by SAP people but many others are like ghost town. There are basically 2-3 people answering all ABAP questions. We should pray for their good health.

SDN/SCN was a wonderful thing and SAP destroyed it by giving it first to Marketing to ransack, then giving leadership to a completely wrong person for the job and shutting off any feedback that does not fit the party line. So, there isn't much power to harness left anymore, I'm afraid. It's something that I'd love to be wrong about but I have a feeling it won't be the case.
Jelena_Perfiljeva
Active Contributor
It's a nice post, Christian, and I like your quote. You are spot on. Regarding SAP Community, I feel there is lack of understanding of what is actually going on and has been going on for years. Please see my comment above.

Personally, I'm no longer interested in helping with community matters but you might find some active SAP Mentors to talk to about this under NDA. Their names are on the Influencer page (link is also in my comment).

Thanks!
choirshark
Advisor
Advisor
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Hi Jelena, thanks for the reply. I have heard that comment a few times. I can only say that many people are very aware of this sentiment, and the people I work with understand we need to make changes and regain some of the momentum that was left. I think we are on the right track. I think, for example, adding the feature of "groups" will help us bring focus and energy to specific areas, which could be centered around locations, topics, special interests or events. This is just being rolled out and I think we will gain many insights in the rollout. The community can only succeed when we get honest feedback and suggestions, like you have provided and I thank you for that.
choirshark
Advisor
Advisor
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Thanks for the comment, I am just starting the process here and will surely reach out to the mentors. Many thanks.

 
Michael_Deller
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
Hi Chris, as a fan of and contributor to the community, I share your goals. We'd probably need to operationalize "which ERP to choose" a little - like, when do I go for public resp. private cloud. Or would you extend this to "when NOT to buy Workday"? Our own or a partner's presales might have interesting rules for this.

On second thought, in a concrete case, there may be criteria which are very individual / political / ... or otherwise not too ideal to be discussed in front of a community. At least there would need to be a larger number of folks in there who deal with the same question, if I want to leverage the "community" benefits.

Let's evolve this and get the ball back to rolling there!
choirshark
Advisor
Advisor
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Thanks, yes, good input, I am collecting a list of things we can do,
JakobSchneller
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
Hi Chris,

first of all: thank you very much for the very valuable and valid blog post!

From my point of view, there is no question that the power of a lively community should never be underestimated and that each party involved should aim to make the most out of it.

Reading the comments before, I think the key challenge is that there will always be a trade-off, when you try to further integrate a community into a customer journey. The reason behind is simple: A customer journey aims to be as consistent as possible to offer prospects and customers a smooth experience along the way. Providing this consistency requires control. Typically, more consistency requires more control. On the other hand, I believe that a lively community is based on the willingness of community members to share their views and knowledge in a natural and sometimes also personal way, which might be impacted by the control measures mentioned above.

Thus, making the most out of the community requires to get the right balance here. I guess there is no perfect advice, how to do this, but I think there are several parameters that can be influenced. This starts with the positioning of the community in the broader context of SAP´s web presence, continues with the community structure and the degree of content curation and of course ends with the content itself.

I hope this helps. I am excited to see, how the community will evolve.
choirshark
Advisor
Advisor
Thanks! Yes we start a journey here. I am getting a lot of valuable feedback right now, and will probably start in a limited area, maybe using the group capability just being added
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Hey Chris,

I agree, it's got to be hard for customers to find trusted information. I think the community is a great way to build trust and AUTHENTICITY.

I just blogged about how my opinions on how communities in general are integral to today's sales cycle. Especially as things continue to trend low touch and cloud.

Would love to hear your thoughts.

https://blogs.sap.com/2022/03/16/lets-talk-about-the-taboo-community-the-sales-cycle/