LinkedIn Peer Rated Skills Are a Useful Proxy for Success

I am planning to conduct an integration workshop for a few of my pre-sales colleagues so that they can tell the integration story to customers, prospects and partners. When I wanted to get a clear idea about their skills and backgrounds, I went to LinkedIn rather than going to an internal source because there is no reliable internal source of information for skills and competencies of an employee. I suspect that is the case in almost all organizations in the world.

I found out that LinkedIn skills provide a reasonably accurate picture of a person's skills. I looked at the top 5 skills (based on peer ratings) of all the colleagues planning to participate in the training and created a word cloud of their skills. Enterprise Software was on the top followed by Pre-Sales and then interestingly enough - business intelligence. That is because many of the successful enterprise architects at SAP came from Business Objects and have the skill to explain complex concepts in an easy to understand manner. This is eye opening to me. It looks like colleagues with Business Intelligence backgrounds may be able to explain cloud to on-premise integration better than those with a human resource technology background. The fourth skill is SaaS followed by SAP.

I also looked at their previous organizations. I found out that If they have worked at SAP, an SAP customer or another large enterprise software vendor, their chances of succeeding in the role we are planning for them is high. If they came from a very small software vendor with a narrow area of expertise, they may find it difficult to succeed in this role.

SuccessFactors Compensation & Variable Pay Integration With SAP ERP HCM

We are in the process of integrating SuccessFactors Variable Pay with SAP ERP HCM. We are thinking about writing a separate white paper that covers the SuccessFactors Compensation and Variable Pay integration with SAP ERP HCM. It might take a month or so to write it. The plan is to make the document available along with the November 2014 release. The release is internally referred to as the 1411 release.

The purpose of this document is not to influence the design. The purpose is to communicate the design and outline assumptions, prerequisites, limitations and the process flow. If you are a variable pay expert and would like to review the document and provide feedback, please let me know. Leave a comment, message me on twitter or email me. 

The packaged integration between SuccessFactors Compensation and SAP ERP HCM is documented in service market place.

If Data Is The New Oil, These Are The Oil Wells

It is evident that data generated by everyone and everything in the world is the new resource that will drive the world economy and improve living standards for the next generation. Experts say that those who own data will be powerful in the future. A bit like Saudi Arabia for oil. There will be a lot of people who will organize that data and make that data available in a useful format. Think of them as the refineries.

Data.gov is the US government's source for government data. It is free, which means it is funded by tax payers. I find this source very interesting.

Another interesting data source is Quandl. I tested some of the Finance and Country data APIs from Quandl using Google App Inventor's API features. The data platform is well organized and well documented. I am amazed at the ease with which all this data can be accessed and consumed. A good programmer working with a good product manager can work wonders with this new oil.

What are Packaged Integrations?

Today a colleague emailed me and asked me what we mean by packaged integrations and how they are different from say a custom integration that a consulting team can build. I wrote him this email and thought that it might be useful for everyone.

1. Productized integration components provided by SAP
Productized components of integration include: packaged integrations, standard integration templates, best practice content for implementation, custom integrations from SAP professional services teams, and application programming interfaces. Packaged integrations cover the common integrations needed by most customers. They take very little time to implement; usually about 20 percent of what it would take to build and implement a custom integration.

1.1.1 Packaged Integrations
SAP has invested in identifying, developing, documenting, delivering, and maintaining a library of functionally rich integrations that most customers need to connect SAP cloud solutions to on-premise and 3rd party applications. This approach makes it faster, easier, and cheaper for customers to implement such integrations.

Each packaged integration is designed by SAP software architects using knowledge gained by studying thousands of customer implementations, and in collaboration with tens of co-innovation customers. Packaged integrations are managed by SAP product managers like any other software product, and are subject to the same design, testing, documentation, and release rigor as any other SAP product. Such rigor significantly reduces the risk of business interruption for customers.  With packaged integrations, customers get access to SAP deep domain knowledge and best practices for hybrid deployments of on-premise and cloud applications. Packaged integrations cover most foundational integrations required by SAP cloud applications.

1.1.2 Standard integration templates
Standard integration templates are built to connect SAP cloud products with 3rd-party software vendors in multiple categories. For example, there is a standard integration template to connect SuccessFactors Employee Central with 3rd-party time management software vendors.

1.1.3 Best practices content and custom integration services
SAP provides best practices content, for many integrations scenarios. Customers and partners can use these to implement integrations in a predictable manner. These best practices content is delivered free of cost to all customers and partners from service market place.

Packaged integrations cannot cover every integration scenario. To address this, SAP consulting teams provide custom integration services to build customer-specific integrations. SAP consulting teams have deep expertise in connecting SAP cloud products to 3rd-party solutions both on-premise and in the cloud.  They also maintain a library of reusable code that can be used to significantly reduce the risks and cost of implementation.

1.1.4 Application Programming Interfaces for customer specific integrations
Customers and partners often strive to build unique integrations to differentiate themselves from competitors. To help customers build integrations unique to their needs, SAP offers a rich set of open, standards-based, APIs to leverage for custom integrations. SAP customers and partners have already built thousands of custom integrations using these cloud APIs.

Side-by-Side HCM Deployment Model Integration Guide

There are three cloud deployment models for the SuccessFactors HCM Suite of applications. The third deployment model is the Side-by-Side HCM deployment model. In this model, SAP ERP HCM customers who want to run human capital management software for a subsidiary, or a certain geographic region completely in the cloud can do so. For customers who are not ready to move Core HR for all their employees to the cloud, this might be a good way to test the waters for Core HR in the cloud. For certain other customers this might be a good way to keep implementation costs down for integrating a new acquisition.

For example a couple of weeks back I met a customer from the chemical industry who is planning to divest some of their divisions but continue to be the information technology provider for all those divested divisions. At the same time they did not want to start an SAP ERP HCM implementation project for those divested divisions.That would be expensive, time consuming and risky. The Side-by-Side HCM deployment model suits the needs of such customers too.

This is not something we recommend for all customers. Customer needs and current landscapes need to be carefully studied before recommending this deployment model to a customer.

The first packaged integration that supports this deployment model was released as part of the August 2014 release. The configuration document is now available in service market place.

There are a number of design boundaries that the implementation team needs to be aware of. If you a colleague recommending the Side-by-Side deployment model to a customer or a customer considering the Side-by-Side HCM deployment model, I urge you to read the document and understand the possibilities and limitations. This document is the most authentic source of information.