When you think about Enterprise Software, have you ever wondered what it would be like to be the CIO for the Company that makes the world’s most widely used Enterprise Solutions?
Can you imagine the vision you would have for the role of the CIO itself – where it is going, the influential trends and technologies defining this C-suite role into the future? And, more importantly, how the CIO can and will leverage these technologies to shape and form better business?
Well, I wondered just that, and was supremely fortunate to discuss these and other revealing questions with SAP’s CIO, Helen Arnold.
We explored her role in steering SAP’s direction, touching on such topics as Cloud, Mobile, and Big Data, Innovation and Integration, Complexity and Simplicity, and other powerful ideas all relevant to Companies and the CIOs who help lead them.
Through this discussion, I think it becomes apparent that more than ever the business-minded, business-process capable, innovative CIO is incredibly well-positioned to help companies and even industries embrace the opportunities presented by these new technologies, to make sense out of them, and to define how to wield them to drive meaningful business value.
John: Tell us a little bit about your role as CIO of the world’s leading Enterprise Application provider? How many different hats do you wear? Do you interact with SAP customers? Are you engaged in SAP software development?
Helen: In May this year, I was appointed SAP CIO and head of cloud delivery. I am also a member of SAP’s Global Managing Board. This means on the one hand, I oversee the IT function, manage cloud delivery to our customers and ensure that we at SAP implement our own innovation first.
On the other, I am also involved in setting SAP’s strategic direction. It’s challenging and exciting. I meet customers and help them find ways to run their businesses better with the help of our technology and software.
I – and my teams – are also extremely closely aligned with both the sales and the development functions at SAP. My organization implements our software innovation as the first reference customers/first validator. Once we have implemented, we feed our responses back to development so that they can make improvements. And then we align with the sales teams, explain how we at SAP run SAP so that they can go forward with those messages to the customers.
It’s great to be CIO and at the helm of cloud delivery organization just as we are seeing this new era of cloud software and services – it’s an inflexion point for our industry
John: According to Research firm IDC, LoB executives will be involved in 80% of all new IT investments and will function as the lead decision makers in more than half of those investments by 2016. How is this impacting the role of the CIO?
Helen: The CIO is a business enabler and strategic advisor to the LOBs. I tell people that the ‘I’ in ‘CIO’ stands for innovation and integration, as well as for information I ensure that IT is the first validator of new products, which means we become experts in innovation. We are also experts in integration – bringing together different solutions and deployment models in a hybrid landscape in order to provide seamless business process and support experience for our customers.
John: How is the cloud changing things for the CIO?
Helen: Cloud will continue to grow, and more and more software will become cloud-enabled. There will be new business processes that we haven’t thought about or heard of yet. So the growth of cloud is predictable – but the kind of innovation that awaits us is not. This is very exciting – as I said before, it is a new wave. Smartphones and tablets will become more and more powerful and user friendly. In the upcoming years, everyone will access services and data mainly via these mobile devices. Therefore, turning to the cloud is a must!
I strongly recommend that companies – and CIOs – that haven’t thought about cloud yet should start establishing their cloud strategy now. They need to work out what their first steps are – do they start with HCM? CRM? SRM? They need to think about integration between their cloud solutions and on premise solutions. They need to plan their process and system integration between different cloud solutions (if they have different vendors). They can rely on their IT departments to become cloud brokers, working on this integration.
From SAP’s point of view, we will offer cloud solutions for all our applications, across all lines of business. SAP technology and software is here to help customers take the step towards the cloud.
Amongst our customers, I’m seeing certain trends: Those who invested less in software in the past are now moving much faster to the cloud because they appreciate its cost-effectiveness and they want to invest. Companies with large, robust on premise implementations are moving more slowly and more cautiously. So businesses who use cloud are taking the line of business view. This means they decide to use a cloud HCM or CRM or FI. Once they have one line of business established as a cloud service, then they decide if they will subscribe to another.
Cloud is changing the face of IT. Business can make the decision to move to the cloud without the input of IT, which means business becomes increasingly independent of IT. This independence means IT has to work harder to stay relevant – and so IT departments have to become innovative. They now spend much more time on business process innovation and in the end embrace and serve the LoBs much, much better.
We are also seeing a challenge to complexity. Customers have built complex landscapes, and we are now offering them the opportunity to simplify and reduce that complexity via access to innovation and optimized business processes
John: There are many definitions of cloud out there. Some view it as a delivery model, others as offsite storage – what does cloud mean to SAP?
Helen: I want to move away from the idea of cloud as a delivery model:
- Cloud is about choice
- It is about speed to value
- It is about continuously improving business processes, endless opportunities for change and seamless navigation between different parts of the business
- Cloud is about the move from complexity to simplicity
We are not just saying this – we see it in our own business, and we see this at our customers too by standardizing software, we free up the innovation budget. Customers can now speed their innovation dollars on what makes them unique
John: We discussed with SAP Cloud CMO, Tim Minahan many interesting examples of how SAP Cloud is transforming business and how it is helping SAP customers. Can you share with us how the cloud is transforming SAP?
Helen: Integration and innovation are key. In order to support this ever-updating business innovation, IT also needs to become more agile – both as a thought leader and in driving time to value. Since cloud is standardized, we are working on simplifying our solutions for cloud consumption. This helps our customers stay nimble so that they can face their biggest business challenges. Internally, we implement more and more cloud solutions. We are learning to breathe cloud as a company and we transmit our experience to our customers as best practices.
John: In our articles on SAP Cloud, it would appear that increasingly CIOs and their teams need to adopt Business Expertise as their core value proposition. I also believe Integration is key in the Cloud world, especially in a hybrid cloud model. And, I think it is perhaps too early to completely forsake some of the basics, like Infrastructure, Networking, Security, etc. What is your perspective on this?
Helen: Integration is key when we talk about the enterprise cloud. SAP doesn’t just offer our customers slices of cloud functionality – we offer them a cloud journey, at their own pace, in a way that best suits their business.
And for this, integration is critical.
SAP can provide customers with seamless integration as they transition to the cloud. We are experts in state-of-the-art integration across all possible models. Infrastructure, networking and security are all vital too. We have stringent availability standards, data security standards and green energy standards at all our data centers across the globe.
What many don’t realize is that while cloud software is standardized, our cloud services, architecture and operations are also standardized. This allows for faster and more flexible delivery. Our enterprise cloud infrastructure is effective and efficient along the dimensions of performance, capability, cost and breadth:
- Our breadth of offering is vast, ranging from SAP HANA One on Amazon Web Services, where customers can literally subscribe by the hour to the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud where we run our customers’ mission-critical apps for them on SAP HANA
- We partner with Intel for the R&D in advanced processor technology, helping us gain performance improvements in network throughput, persistent memory capacity and storage capacity
- We have to ensure high availability, and so we re-architect persistence storage shared in the rack, manage our hardware lifecycles carefully and manage data via ongoing design innovation
- We leverage our buying power with vendors to keep costs down for the benefit of our customers
John: Big Data is a trending topic. As CIO, how do you help SAP customers make sense of Big Data?
Helen: We tell them it is so much more than speed – it is about achieving new business benefits, optimizing how we do things. We really saw this at SAP when we implemented SAP Simple Finance earlier this year:
- We eliminated aggregates and indices and achieved full reporting flexibility
- Stats:
- 70% reduction in reconciliation time
- Reduced ERP database footprint from 7,1 TB to 1,8 TB
- 30% less processing time at financial close
- 40% less posting corrections at financial close
- 80% less cost center re-org time during org changes
- 10% fewer fraud cases
- Closing books five days earlier than we used to do
We offer our finance managers Mobile Finance:
- They can make better decisions in real time, anytime, anywhere
- They can manage their operations more effectively
- They can accelerate key process cycle times and eliminate approval bottlenecks
This is already reality at SAP, thanks to the combination of HANA, Simple Finance and mobility
John: Generally speaking, what do you see as the big trends in IT over the next 3 to 5 years, and how should CIOs position to best help their companies?
Helen: We are talking about business networks on a revolutionary scale – bigger than eBay, Amazon and Alibaba combined. With SAP’s intention to purchase Concur, SAP now offers the biggest business network in the world.
We are talking about frictionless commerce – reduced complexity without reduced sophistication. So the networked economy is a huge trend. The digitization of fast-growing, multilayered, highly interactive, real-time connections among people, devices, and businesses. The Internet of Things – so wearables, connected cars, connected machinery – is also upon us. CIOs have to prepare to help their companies to be ready for the next wave: and this is the networked economy, especially in the manufacturing and automotive space we will see a huge change
John: As a CIO, what are your top priorities?
Helen: These are my top three:
1st: To position SAP as the cloud company, leading all our customers to the cloud – safely, securely, integrated seamlessly and using any cloud model they choose.
2nd: To ensure the success of our customers.
3rd: To ensure the success of our teams internally, running SAP solutions so that we can reduce complexity and run more simply.
John: What keeps you awake at night?
Helen: Nothing! I sleep extremely well.
John: What do you find most fulfilling about your role as SAP’s CIO? What do you love most about it?
Helen: Serving as a CIO is quite amazing: On the one hand, I’m excited about meeting customers, hearing first-hand from them how our technology and software helps them run better. On the other hand, our internal teams, our IT, are playing a very strategic role as first validators of SAP software. They are collaborating and co-innovating with development to ensure that we at SAP adopt our own innovation. We see the improvements and the benefits of this. I am really proud to say that we run all SAP’s mission-critical applications on SAP HANA. And this is not just about technology; it is about clear business outcomes and optimization. Which we then feed back to the customers. It’s an amazing software cycle and I am proud and excited to be at the helm of that. Especially at a time when we see an inflexion in the industry, and we know that there is a lot of change ahead of us.
To discuss these topics, please contact me at john@ecommercecio.com
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