A Ranked List by Jon Reed of JonERP.com
Published: February 2008
In this piece, I am charting the SAP Skills "You Want To Have." The emphasis is on skills you can acquire either on your own or on SAP projects right now. Note that this list is not the same as a list of hot SAP skills, though I have now completed one of those for the hot SAP functional modules. This list is a little more forward-thinking. The list you are about to read is the "SAP Skills You Want to Have" list, which looks a bit more to the future to chart out the key skills you want to have going forward. Before you read this list, I also recommend reading the general disclaimer for my SAP skills lists, which has some important pointers.
If you want to see how this list was compiled, go here.
Solution Manager - In the NetWeaver and eSOA era, there are all kinds of nifty SAP tools to add to your skill set, but one tool stands out above the others: Solution Manager. The reason I like Solution Manager so much is that it applies to many different SAP contexts. It’s one of the few bridges between pre-NetWeaver SAP, NetWeaver SAP, and the eSOA and analytics era also. You don’t have to be on the latest version of SAP to get access to this tool.
You can use Solution Manager to manage your SAP upgrade, and then you can use it for performance management and optimization after the upgrade. Solution Manager even contains a comprehensive change management program for handling the cultural and role changes involved in new SAP rollouts.
Solution Manager also positions you to get involved with cutting edge eSOA projects. You can generate "process objects" with Solution Manager, allowing you to begin the road towards composite application development. You can also port data from Solution Manager into Master Data Management (MDM) for number-crunching. As SAP continues its push towards a "Business Process Platform," it is also making an effort to automate routine processes and provide a central spot for managing system performance and business processes. More and more, it looks like Solution Manager will be integral to this vision.
BI/BW MDX - A lot of SAP folks haven’t heard of BW MDX, but it’s a key to creating SOA-driven "mashups" that leverage the BW environment. And the best thing? You don’t have to be running on BI 7.0 to use MDX. Any BW application from 3.x onward that is runs on some flavor on NetWeaver can "express an MDX." Short for Multi-Dimensional Expression Language, MDX allows you to take advantage of third party best-of-breed content and "mash" it with your internal data.
I did a podcast with Krishna Kumar of Enterprise Horizons where he goes into detail on how this is done. There is a general trend towards using BI-driven mashups. This might be the easiest way to get involved in SOA and generate an instant value that can be used to build momentum for more eSOA projects. So what if you can’t get access to MDX right away? If you’re an SAP technical type, you can still gear up for eventual MDX work by getting more involved with XML and XML/A, an XML for Analysis tool.
NetWeaver Composition Environment (CE) - The NetWeaver CE is SAP’s versatile Java-based environment that now ships with NetWeaver 7.1. Now, just because CE is a Java EE 5 platform does NOT mean that SAP is abandoning ABAP. That’s a topic for another article. However, skills in the CE toolkit are going to be valuable. So why am I making an exception to this list and putting down a product as vast as CE? Because unlike most SAP products, you can test drive CE on your own right from the SAP Developer Network.
Web 2.0 Skills - I can see the functional folks getting restless with all this talk of neato techie tools. So let’s go back to a basic piece of professional knowledge we all need: how Web 2.0 tools are impacting business at the enterprise-level. To be fair, many companies have not figured out how to turn Web 2.0 projects into profitable aspects of their business model, but they will get there.
Just look at SAP: through its SDN and BPX Online Communities, SAP has changed their whole development model and brought them in much closer contact with their customers throughout the software lifecycle. There are more than one million members of these two communities, and that’s had a huge impact on the SAP product line. So what does an SAP professional do about this?
The problem is that SAP, for the brilliance of its own communities, has not really built a Web 2.0 tool set for its own customers that is fully integrated into SAP. We can expect it to come, but in my opinion, this is one of the few areas where Oracle is well ahead of SAP with its own Oracle WebCenter 2.0 toolkit. But SAP will get there. In the meantime, there are all kinds of things we can learn about Web 2.0 on our own, even if it’s just a matter of helping to build and contribute to a wiki-based tech support system or helping a customer integrate a blog into its customer-facing web applications.
"Business Process Expert" skills - SAP roles are changing on both the functional and technical side. Some would say they are merging. What we do know is that all SAP professionals need to acquaint themselves with the skills of the Business Process Expert (BPE, or as the SAP BPX community calls them, BPXers). SAP’s BPX Community has a bunch of great resources for getting a better feel for the BPE skill set, and better yet, you can interact with other BPX members and build that skill set profile together.
Note that if you want to get a great look at what it takes to become a Business Process Expert, you can check out my podcast with Marco ten Vaanholt, the Global Director of SAP BPX.
In August of 2007, Marco was part of a massive ASUG-sponsored webcast on the Role of the Business Process Expert. There were more than 600 people on the webcast, which gives some indication of the urgency SAP customers and consultants are feeling about getting a handle on this new skill set. During the webcast, I picked up on six distinct areas of the "BPE skill set of the future":
1. End-to-end business process know-how (as opposed to "silo" functional knowledge in just one area).
2. Business Process Management(BPM) tool expertise (I have covered a couple of these tools in this article)
3. "Soft Skills" - the ability to be a customer-facing SAP professional who understands business strategy (as opposed to a "cubicle coder."). As Marco puts it, soft skills are about having the savvy to be a "marriage counselor" between IT and the business user community.
4. Industry knowledge - SAP professionals need to cultivate more of an industry focus, as opposed to the traditional jumping around from project to project across many industries.
5. Web 2.0 skills, which I just covered.
6. SAP product knowledge - last but not least, traditional SAP product knowledge, with a good understanding of the NetWeaver architecture and the delivery of future upgrades via "enhancement packages."
Clearly, you could write a whole series of articles on becoming an SAP BPE. A couple quick observations for now: for most of the ‘90s, all you needed to rake in some great SAP rates was number 6, SAP product knowledge.
Obviously this is still an important part of the SAP skill set - how could it now be? But we can see that a more balanced consulting skill set is now in order. And when you look at this BPE list above, note that all six of these skills can be developed online via free online resources, and that’s not even considering the various training programs and advanced degrees that are out there.
Visual Composer - Visual Composer has gotten a bit lost in the skills shuffle due to the emphasis on more glamorous BPM tools, but make no mistake, Visual Composer is a very powerful tool for both functional and technical consultants. I had one of the foremost experts in mashups practically whisper to me at TechEd about how potent Visual Composer was, as if he couldn’t believe more people hadn’t caught on. Visual Composer is not just for building slick GUIs - it’s also great for taking advantage of the mashup power of SAP Analytics.
A technical expert may be needed at some point to drive these model designs home, but there is still a lot a functional (or technical) person can do within the Visual Composer environment. Admittedly, Visual Composer is not as easy to get your hands on as some SAP tools. There are currently two versions: Visual Composer 6.0 was made available as part of NetWeaver 7.0, and with NetWeaver 7.1, Visual Composer ships as part of the NetWeaver Composition Environment.
SAP Enterprise Modeling - If you haven’t heard of SAP Enterprise Modeling, don’t worry about being out of the loop - a lot of folks haven’t heard of it yet. "Enterprise Modeling" is the new name for the IDS Scheer tool formerly called Aris for NetWeaver. Enterprise Modeling is going to be a big deal for SAP. The product is billed as: "a joint application which provides essential elements of a closed-loop BPM (Business Process Management) solution, from design and configuration, to implementation and execution, to evaluation of the overall process."
A couple of things to note here: first, in plain English, what we’re really talking about is empowering IT managers and business process experts to participate in application development through visual modeling tools. Programmers should not panic: we are still a pretty long way from generating perfectly customized code from BPM software.
But the idea of being able to model business processes visually and then create a development environment based on those models is very appealing, not to mention cost-effective. I would argue that all SAP professionals, both functional and technical, need to get a handle on these kinds of tools if you want to stay ahead of the skills curve.
Of course, I can hear your legitimate protest: why am I recommending a tool that is not readily available? The answer is that there are all kinds of Aris-type modeling tools out there. I spoke with one manager on a major SAP retail project who had not succeeded in getting SAP Enterprise Modeling in his operating budget - his superiors weren’t biting yet. So, he’s asking his team to learn about these modeling tools pro-actively by trying out similar open source tools. Others can do the same.
It’s important to note that SAP Enterprise Modeling is just one of five related BPM products IDS Scheer has developed for SAP. These products do not come cheap, so if you’re lucky enough to get exposure to them, dive in! You can see a listing of these products here.
Honorable Mention
There are too many emerging skills to list in one article. Here’s a few more to try to get your hands on:
Web Dynpro for Java and Web Dynpro for ABAP - custom GUI design is hot stuff; these tools will show you the way.
Microsoft Duet and Adobe Interactive Forms - It’s important to get a feel for the different ways users can now view and interact with SAP information.
NetWeaver Mobile - In the coming years, more and more SAP users will be accessing SAP from mobile clients of all flavors. NetWeaver Mobile looks to be the integration hub for this growing area.
"Guided Procedures" - SAP Guided Procedures may be the new age version of Workflow, or SAP Workflow on steroids. For years, SAP Workflow was a classic "teaser" skill - it never had quite enough demand to drive a big consulting market. Guided Procedures is the BPM version of Workflow, where you can map and automate business processes.
MDM - I probably should have put MDM on my original "honorable mention" list for this article. It's definitely a skill area that should be a factor as more SAP customers move in the eSOA direction. For more on this, see my MDM post in my SAP Career Blog.
Conclusion
Yes, it’s impossible to do a comprehensive list of all the cool gadgets and tools you can now pursue in SAP’s vast product landscape. But I hope that this article gave you some ideas for some forward-thinking SAP skills you can pursue now, on your own time, even if you are not currently working in the perfect SAP environment. I look forward to hearing your comments below.
Jon Reed is an independent SAP analyst who writes on SAP consulting trends. Jon is the President of JonERP.com, an interactive web site that features Jon’s take on SAP career trends. Jon is also the author of the SAP Consultant Handbook, and he serves as the career expert for SearchSAP.com's "Ask The Expert" panel.