Becoming an Enterprise Architect: Podcast Transcription
Jon Reed with Kent Sanders, Enterprise Architect
Podcast Interview Date: November 16, 2007
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Jon Reed:  Hi, welcome to our latest podcast on SAP consulting trends. I'm your host, Jon Reed. Joining me is our special guest, Kent Sanders, who is the enterprise architect on a major SAP project in the retail sector. Today we're going to talk with Kent about the keys to attracting and retaining SAP talent, how the SAP technical skill set is changing, building a case for eSOA from the bottom up, and anything else that might come up during our discussion. This podcast is hosted by my site, JonERP.com, and was made possible by a joint collaboration between my site, JonERP.com; B2B Workforce, an SAP premier partner; and ERPGenie, the ultimate ERP website.

Kent, welcome to the podcast. Why don't we start by hearing a little bit about your SAP background and how you wound up in your current role as an enterprise architect.

While I was at SAP I started thinking about where I wanted my career to go next, and about two years ago I discovered enterprise architecture and decided that hey, you know, this sounds like an area I want to get into, because you're merging business goals and IT strategy. So I went out and got myself TOGAF certified and now I'm working for a major retailer that's doing a couple of SAP implementations and I am their SAP enterprise architect.

Reed:  You mentioned TOGAF certification. Can you briefly explain to our listeners what TOGAF is and what the value of that certification is for SAP folks?

Sanders:  TOGAF is The Open Group's architecture framework. It's basically their enterprise architecture framework. TOGAF itself is not a list of deliverables that you come up with at the end of the project. It's more or less a methodology and a guide for how to do enterprise architecture. And it's broken down, I believe, into seven or eight different sections. What you start off with is business architecture, which is helping to define the business strategy to achieve business goals. And then from there you roll down into a technical architecture, solution architecture, data architecture, and then you continue along this continuous chain of improving the architecture when you go back and revisit the entire enterprise architecture based on some certain triggers.

And I found this certification to be helpful for people working in SAP because now and in the future, the skill sets that are really becoming more important are those architecture skill sets. How do I fit everything together?  There's a lot of moving pieces out there: SAP has multiple solutions, and then you throw in the entire NetWeaver stack and it's very, very hard to find people that know how all the pieces go together. And then not only knowing how the pieces fit together from a technical view, but then taking this huge conglomerate of software and using it to solve business problems or to help the business achieve their goals. I think in the direction that we're heading now, those skills and knowledge are going to be much, much more important.

Reed:  At TechEd I had seen a presentation where some SAP executives had explained that they had based SAP's enterprise architecture on TOGAF standards and principles but filled in some additional business process information in that. Is that your understanding also?

Sanders:  Yeah. When I was at SAP and the SAP enterprise architecture framework was being developed, I had a little bit of a hand in it, in some of the earlier days. But when I saw the first release, I was really impressed because the earlier version was something called the SAP Agile Architecture Framework. And the first time I saw it, I was really disappointed in the content.

But with the SAP Enterprise Architecture Framework there is a lot of content around SAP solutions that are delivered, and I was really impressed: I wasn't expecting that much content to be delivered. The gentleman, Frank Lopez, who actually has been leading up the development of the SAP Enterprise Architecture Framework from a global perspective, has done a good job of delivering something that can really deliver value to a business.

Reed:  Excellent. We'll return to these eSOA topics, but first I want to ask you about the conference you just got back from on attracting and retaining SAP talent. When I was at TechEd, I ran into more than one SAP project manager that talked about the difficulty and expense of consultants right now, and the importance of having a good in-house infrastructure for bringing in people and involving them in the in-house team. What have you been learning about that that might be relevant to projects that are trying to push ahead but need some skills to do that?

And even in the consulting market, one of the companies that was there said that if you go to any of the companies  that used to be the Big Six, they don't have the people that really know NetWeaver that well, and at SAP you can't find the people that are really the cutting edge. So if you want to do something with Enterprise SOA, for example, it's difficult to find a consultant even from SAP that knows it because their job is to be out in the field billing all the time as opposed to being trained all the time.

So that area was where people were really concerned, especially since a lot of these companies were 4.7, 4.6 companies and they were upgrading to ERP 6.0. And, looking at the entire NetWeaver suite, they were asking, "Where are going to find people to manage this?" You can't just install, for example, a portal and give it to the Basis guy and say, "Okay, run with it and take care of it," because it's a Java Stack, everything in it's different.

And then when you look at blurring line between the technology and the solution, BI is a good example. When I first started working with BI about five years ago, I came up from the Basis side so it was like, "Great, I can install it, it's an ABAP Stack, no big deal." One of my really premier areas was performance tuning. So when I started trying to performance tune BI systems, I had to become a data modeler because a lot of the performance tuning was based on the entire loading up of process chains. And so I had to teach myself the entire load format and what the data model looked like so that I could actually go in and tune the system which was a lot different than in the R/3 world.

In the R/3 world I'd tune the database, I'd adjust some parameters here, I may buffer up some tables and things like that, but I didn't really get into how the application itself worked. I may help an ABAPer debug programming from a performance viewpoint, but that was really about it.