Before I did into this blog topic, I want to make sure that those who subscribe to this blog are aware of my other sources of content. I have a backlog of posts I intend to feature here, but if you want to track all my content, including my new podcasts and blogs on PAC and SCN, not just the posts here, make sure you’re tracking my feedburner "Master SAP Blog and Podcast Feed." All podcasts are on iTunes at the JonERP iTunes store.

With that out of the way, on to the topic at hand: Why SAP TechEd is relevant to business users. This is the time of year where I hear from business users that they aren’t interested in TechEd or aren’t trying to get approval. This attitude baffles me. SAP TechEd is not only highly relevant to business users, in my view it’s SAP’s best event of the year. Instead of using empty superlatives, I shot a video rant that goes into the specifics of my argument on TechEd’s business relevance. I am hopeful that this content will also help individuals build their business case for SAP TechEd attendance. I even donned a tie for the video so you know I went the extra mile on this one. And no, SAP didn’t ask me to shoot this video. In fact sometimes SAP itself plays down the business relevance of TechEd.

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Already on the ground in Orlando - and deep into an SAP Enteprise Architecture pre-conference deep dive, I received word from Ray Wang, one of the key analysts in the enterprise space, about a groundswell organization to poll SAP user sentiment. And that’s where you come in. Please help us gauge the sentiments of SAP users by filling out our  "Sapphire user sentiment survey."

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Newsflash: Be heard: Complete the "Certification 5" SAP Certification Survey.

Have you ever wanted to see if a band of individuals united around a common cause could have an impact, move a mountain, get an institution much larger than you to change its tune? I know I have – I’ve been rockheaded enough to try it many times over my career, with admittedly varying degrees of success. The most recent such attempt, involving SAP certification, is a story that goes back about nine months, from the first meeting of a group that has come to be known as “the certification five.”

SAP certification is a hugely popular topic for JonERP.com readers, so this post is a chance to say your piece. Right now, on the SAP Community Network, you can read a blog post where the certification five lay out our viewpoints on SAP certification. There is also a link in that post to our complete 55 page white paper, which goes into detail on our positions and also includes feedback from SAP’s Sue Martin, providing SAP Education’s responses to our current stances. If you have an opinion on SAP certification, and I know many of you have a strong one, please hop over to our SCN blog post and comment there.

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This month, JonERP.com released a new book, The Ultimate SAP Pricing Guide. The author of this book, SAP pricing consultant Matthias Liebich, is a twenty year SAP pricing consultant. Over the years, Matthias has become a good friend and valued colleague. But up until two weeks ago, he and I had never met. With the first copies of his book proudly in hand, I paid a visit to Matthias at his home office in Atlanta, Georgia. During the visit, we shot three short videos on SAP pricing skills I am going to share with you in this blog post, along with a few notes from the interviews.

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It’s been an exciting time for SAP career content at JonERP.com. This week, I announced my SAP Career Outlook 2010 series I wrote for the Career Center at SAP Community Network. These two white papers are probably the most important thing I have written about SAP careers this in a decade, so I encourage you to check them out (they are up on SCN also).

One of the problems with writing SAP career content is that "one size does not fit all." Each SAP career path needs to be fleshed out. Sometimes the best way to do that is through a collaboration with another expert. Enter SAP Mentor Tony de Thomasis of the Australia Post. Tony saw my two part video series on "SAP Career Planning" I had posted on SCN - videos that capture some of the themes of the white paper series. Tony then took those videos a step further with a fabulous Prezi on the career path for Basis-NetWeaver pros. I then raised the stakes of collaboration again, by taping four commentary tracks through Tony’s Prezi slides. You can see these in this blog post.

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On Wednesday, December 9, I had the opportunity to attend the much-debated "Sapience 2009: Alternatives for Leveraging Your Investment in SAP" conference in Boston. I say "much-debated" because there was a good deal of talk both prior to the conference and afterwards in terms of whether the Sapience show was "anti-SAP" or not. In this blog post, I’ll weigh in on that topic and more. And yes, this entry is not exactly on time.  To be honest, it took me a long time to sort through what I might be able to add to this discussion. At any rate, the challenges SAP faces have not gone away since this event took place.

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Another video highlight from 2009 I am now posting on this blog is my "How (Not) to Behave on Twitter" video. I taped this when I was in a bit of a pissed off mood about some common misbehaviors on Twitter I find particularly annoying. But after the fact, I thought there was some decent stuff on this video on the best ways to use Twitter to your advantage if you’re an SAP professional, and maybe a few laughs besides.

When I posted this on the SAP Community Network, I said, about the video, "In this unforgiving yet low key rant, Jon Reed of JonERP.com presents, for Twitter users, ‘how not to behave’ on Twitter if you want to use it for business - either for your employer or yourself." That’s a pretty good summary of what you’re about to see. Oh, and if you want to track me on Twitter and ask me quesions in real time, find me at @jonerp.

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As the year winds down, I’m playing catchup on a couple of my favorite JonERP videos I posted on the SAP Community Network that I haven’t had a chance to post on my web site yet. The first two feature Sue Martin of SAP on the changes afoot with SAP certification, and how the dialogue between SAP Education and the SAP Mentors (an initiative I am a part of) is impacting the direction of SAP certification.

From the Mentors side, I can tell you that as I see it, one major goal is to ensure that the SAP certification of the future has more direct relevance to hiring managers and is more closely tied to the bona fides of real world project experience. That’s a strong message we’ve gotten from the SAP community, and we’re trying to translate that into specific practical suggestions that can be implemented. We’ll see more about what kind of success we are having with that in 2010, but for now, these two videos I taped with Sue Martin at SAP TechEd 2009 Phoenix will give you an inside view.

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I’m posting a handful of my favorite videos from 2009 to close out the year. One highlight, without a doubt, was this shoot with Ann Rosenberg. To get to the bottom of the impact of BPM on SAP’s tools, skills, and consulting approaches, I managed to get the "Goddess of BPM," Ann Rosenberg herself, otherwise known as the Global Practice Owner for Business Process Management at SAP, to sit down for a live video shoot at SAP TechEd Phoenix. We shot the nine minute video on my flipcam and I thought the sound quality was very good, given that we were just outside the Community Clubhouse, where people were talking it up as usual. I consider BPM to be one of the most important skill areas inside of SAP, but it brings with it a great deal of hype as well. We got into those issues during this video.

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During the holiday season, I’ve been digging out a few of my most watched videos of the year and posting them on JonERP.com. This video, on "Making the Business Case for SAP Mentors," is my best attempt to date to capture the impact of the SAP Mentor Initiative - at least on my own work. I taped this video prior to the SAP Influencer Summit on December 8, 2009 in Boston. This was a late night video project, and I took three shoots - this one was the winner. We were asked to submit a video on a compelling story from the SAP ecosystem with a business case - something with real meaning to SAP customers. I believe the SAP Mentor Initiative is such a story - during this video, I make my case.

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In 2009, I filmed a few more videos than usual. Mostly I was tricked into it by SAP Community Network members who asked me to contribute profiles and other community videos. I’m nothing special with video production, but I did find that my YouTube SAP video channel got more hits that I would have expected. So now, I’m posting a few highlights on this blog. One is this video on SAP training and certification. I haven’t blogged much on breaking into SAP this year, partially because I have already written about this subject in detail, and partially because there are specialists in this area who are serving this market well, such as JonERP advertiser SAPCookbook.com. I shot this video as a warmup, but it’s gotten about 500 views with no promotion, and as I looked at it again, I realized it did have some focused advice I have boiled down over the years.

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There is something of a quietly simmering debate on whether Twitter is an adequate replacement for RSS or not. I’m not sure the debate can be settled, because so much of it depends on how the individual uses these tools, but I’ll give my take on this and how it impacts those who have a stake in SAP (and ERP) trends - as well as how to monitor my new shared ERP news feed.

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As I write this, I’m gearing up for SAP TechEd 2009 Phoenix. I’ll be in Phoenix the whole week, meeting with SAP Mentors, putting on SAP skills workshops, hanging out in the SAP Community Clubhouse, and going to every session I can work in. I expect SAP skills to be a hot topic at TechEd. There will be plenty of talk on the evolving SAP Business Objects roadmap and how it intersects with SAP skills needed, the impact of BPM/BPX skills trends for technical and functional SAP professionals, and the challenge of finding a sustainable SAP career path in an era of downward rate pressure and global sourcing. I expect to us to start hearing about "virtual staffing" models as well - using the cloud, so to speak, to supplement on site staff via teams of "vitual consultants." There should be some good discussion/debate on the value of SAP certification as well, and the latest on SAP’s three tiered certification program. I’m giving three SAP skills workshops at SAP TechEd Phoenix. Following is a blog entry I posted on SAP SCN with some detail on these sessions, as well as how to find me in Phoenix and follow my live JonERP Tweetstream. I hope to see you there.

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Recently I was corresponding with the illustrious Michael Doane as he put his finishing touches on his upcoming SAP Green Book, which looks to be another Michael Doane classic. In an email, Michael asked me about what SAP users should be doing to cultivate in-house teams. I’ve been writing about talent management a lot lately, including a recent blog post for PAC on how to attract and retain SAP talent. In the email to Michael, I also touched on the skills migration paths for SAP professionals. Some of it will probably wind up in the Green Book, but in the meantime, I wanted to take those comments and share them with JonERP readers in an enhanced form.

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To say the SAP job market is competitive right now would be an understatement, so it’s time to revisit the subject I posted on late last year: mistakes SAP job seekers make and how to avoid them. The first mistake? “Chasing dollars, not skills.” The latest mistake? Trying to make more than one SAP job change at a time. To understand how this works, I’ll draw on emails I receive from frustrated SAP job seekers who are trying to improve their strategy.

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If you were to go by the keynotes and scheduled events, you would think there are no longer any issues with SAP skills development. Read beyond the headlines. Just like some of the most important news stories show up in the back pages, the same is true at SAP shows. Of all the things I was struck by at ASUG/Sapphire 2009, the one that made the biggest impression on me was the silence around SAP skills trends.

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One of the bigger surprises at Sapphire 2009 was the emphasis on sustainability. I expected some discussion on this topic – I did not expect it to be a centerpiece of Leo’s keynote or a major emphasis of SAP’s new “Clear Enterprise” campaign. This led me to Tweet at the conference: “Should SAP consultants ‘green’ their SAP skills?” I had a couple interesting responses; in this blog entry I’ll riff a bit on what this might mean.

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Yesterday, someone asked me what we could expect out of Sapphire this year, in terms of SAP’s major announcements. Guessing at these scoops is good fun because SAP makes a point of keeping keynote announcements under wraps, and no, not even SAP Mentors get a look at the envelopes that Leo Apotheker and other keynoters will be opening. But that question got me thinking. I realized that at Sapphire, there are always three lines of questioning: 1. The agenda SAP is trying to set; 2. The agenda customers are truly interested in, and 3. The questions I am most interested in. So let’s take a look at how these might overlap, or not.

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I’ve been getting a lot of questions about marketing yourself as an SAP consultant lately. That’s not a surprise given that jobs are hard to come by, for reasons I get into in my recent podcast with SAP Mentor Vijay Vijayasankar on the impact of offshoring on SAP consulting. I’m getting enough questions on the topic of self-marketing that I’m actually about to do a webcast that addresses these themes with MBO partners and ERP-Consulting.com. There’s an understandable confusion about which social media web sites can actually help with a SAP job search. Add to that the overhype that has come into play with Facebook and Twitter in particular, and you wind up with too many web sites, too little time.

One good starting point is to separate out active job hunting from the long term pursuit of “building a great consulting network.” For the immediate gratification of finding a position next week, the job boards are still a big factor. When you think about LinkedIn, sending frantic emails to your contacts every week that you’re looking for a new position is going to backfire. So what tactics do work on LinkedIn? And what kind of payoff are we going after?

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Twitter has become a real asset to me in my work tracking SAP market and skills trends. More importantly, it has deepened my relationships with many very smart and interesting people in the SAP community. As a result, I decided to do a couple of YouTube videos on my Twitter experiences and make some recommendations on how to go about following SAP folks on Twitter. I did this partially because I think there are misconceptions about how to use Twitter that you need to throw out in order to use Twitter effectively. I’ll share the videos I did in this post, as well as some additional thoughts I didn’t get to share in the videos about making your Twitter experience worthwhile. Editor’s note: the YouTube videos may not display properly in your browser. Until we fix it, you can see the videos referred to here.

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