SAP Community - Riley Rainey

Are You a Business Expert and not a Pro-Developer? Let's talk ...

2022-08-25T20:04:07+02:00

If you follow SAP's business ecosystem very closely at all, you have probably heard the phrases "Low Code" or "No Code" recently. Such tools represent a simpler approach to developing applications or solutions to repetitive workflow problems in business. My team is currently engaging in a research project to explore the skills and motivations of potential users of such tools.

We are primarily focused on how these tools might be effective to help existing business process folks or similar experts.

If you consider yourself an expert in business processes in any function - for example, finance, HR, or procurement ... with maybe an inclination to construct tools to help your work run more smoothly, we are interested in interviewing you. We'd like to gather facts for our project. We are not attempting to prospect for fresh sales. This research will be used to help the our product teams better understand all of the audiences for our products and services.

We'd like to conduct these roughly one hour interviews in the next couple of weeks.

If you are curious about finding out more, message me on LinkedIn and let's talk.

Riley

Software Development is Evolving. Maybe you are already part of it. If so, let’s chat.

2022-09-12T16:50:23+02:00

A series of neural network generated images by DALL-E from OpenAI

“A business analyst gets help from a software developer”

I’ll tell you more about the images above at the end of this article. But first: you might have read my earlier post (link) in which I described an investigation we are conducting to better understand Citizen Developers. That project continues, and there’s an offshoot of it where – depending on your role -- I want to ask for your help.

Is your company actively working to build a Citizen Developer ecosystem today? Are you one of the people working to help Citizen Developers succeed? If so, we’re interested in talking to you about your experiences. We’re not looking for proprietary information and, as I said in the earlier article, we’re not looking to sell you anything. We’d just like to understand how you might be supporting the success of Citizen Developers today. That might be technical help, data governance, security, or compliance – whatever way you might be contributing would be interesting to us. We’d like to understand what’s working in the real world and where challenges exist.

If you are willing to sit down for a one-hour interview, message me via LinkedIn or DM me on Twitter and I’ll arrange the details.

Thanks, as always.

So. About those images. I recently signed up for OpenAI’s DALL-E beta program. DALL-E is a neural network trained to generate images from a hypothetical text caption. In short, you supply a textual description and DALL-E generates possible images. The results are wild. In the example above, my input literally was, “A sixteenth century business analyst gets help from a software developer”. The rest was up the DALL-E to fill-in.

DALL-E might be simply a curiosity today, but it serves as an example of how large neural networks can be trained to do complex tasks that might not be obvious or easy for a casual user. If you want to experiment with DALL-E yourself, you can get on the beta waitlist here. Enjoy.

In the meantime, if you think you fit the profile I described, we’d appreciate your perspective. Thanks.

Re: Exploring BTP’s New Free Tier Plans

2022-11-23T05:13:32+01:00

I might need to understand more detail about your question, but you should be able to get an accurate list of all services that have free service plans via this service catalog query: https://discovery-center.cloud.sap/viewServices?provider=all&regions=all&category=freetierservices For what it is worth, IAS is not in that list today.

CommScope looking for a Fiori Developer in Richardson

2022-11-23T16:02:33.030000+01:00

I was contacted by a recruiter on LinkedIn (all the time, right?). In this case it was regarding a "senior SAP/Fiori" developer role located either in Lisle, IL or here in Richardson. Not for me, but if that fits your experience profile and career zone, ping me and I'll pass along the contact info.

"Sr. SAP/Fiori Application Developer (Hybrid) role for CommScope out of Lisle Illinois (and Richardson, TX)"

Riley

The 2023 SAP Developer Insights Survey is Live

2023-01-16T02:22:13+01:00

The 2023 SAP Developer Insights Survey is running for the next six weeks. It will take about ten minutes of your time to complete.

2023 marks the fourth consecutive year for this survey. If you design, develop, or test software for SAP applications, platforms, or data: we have questions for you.

Take the 2023 SAP Developer Insights Survey now

The information we gather in the survey has proven to be quite important to us. It is a key resource we use to understand who you are and what you do. These data play an important role in guiding us to shape channels, programs, and to focus content on your needs.

We also publish the results publicly. If you are curious, have a look at the report describing last year’s survey results.

The survey period begins today, January 16th. It will continue for six weeks, ending around March 1st. Our report on this 2023 survey will be released a few weeks after that.

Help us help the SAP Community. Your contribution is important.

Re: Cloud Foundry Memory Quota with 50GB but did not buy anything

2023-02-10T16:04:04+01:00

Hi Mark,

I'm working to get a more authoritative reference for you, but BTP Subscription accounts are structured as a commitment for a specific set of named resources and services. Your organization is invoiced for those resources based on the commitment, not actual use. There's three account types in BTP: Subscription, Cloud Platform Enterprise Agreement (CPEA) and Pay-as-you-Go (PayG). Of the three, the PayG model is the consumption-based pricing model. (see https://www.sapstore.com/medias/Pay-As-You-Go-Free-Tier-Model-for-SAP-BTP-FAQ.pdf )

All that said, I'm unsure where the "50GB" number in the Cockpit originates in your case. In a PayG account, that value would have been allocated as an Entitlement for the subaccount you are operating in. Entitlements are allocated at the subaccount level, not per-Space. I don't have access to a Subscription account to see what might be different there, but I'm checking with the BTP product team to get you a more authoritative answer.

Are you, by chance, the person who created the subaccount? If not, you might check with them and ask if they added any specific entitlements to the subaccount.

I hope this helps explain at least part of it.

Regards,

Riley

Re: Cloud Foundry Memory Quota with 50GB but did not buy anything

2023-02-22T20:04:45+01:00

Thanks, Mark. I'm still looking for a clearer explanation, but a BTP Subscription based account should always have a fixed cost -- it follows that your list of services in the Subscription sets the limit of consumption of each resource. I hope to hear back soon.

Re: Cloud Foundry Memory Quota with 50GB but did not buy anything

2023-02-27T15:00:59+01:00

Hi Mark,

Would you message me via e-mail: firstname.lastname@sap.com -- I have some folks teed-up to investigate this and I need a few extra details.

Thanks,

Riley

Re: The 2023 SAP Developer Insights Survey Report Is Out!

2023-04-11T15:27:40+02:00

Thomas is correct in stating that we didn't ask the question in 2020, however, we did include a question in 2021 to get insight on just this topic; we asked, "Did you work from home prior to January 2020?" -- 29% answered "Yes".

So, there are still roughly 30% of folks that work from home today that did not prior to 2020.

Riley

Re: SAP Stammtisch in Dallas - May 6, 2023

2023-05-01T17:38:32+02:00

"On Friday 5-6-2023 (Saturday), 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM" -- I'm looking forward to attending, but this phrasing looks ambiguous -- we are meeting on Friday, correct?

Re: Stammtisch in Frisco/Plano May 6th

2023-05-01T17:39:15.780000+02:00

I'll be there!

Re: Code Jam by SAP Advocates on June 16th

2023-05-05T17:57:00.664000+02:00

This should be an interesting session, and you won't find folks with more expertise on both CAP and RAP than Tom and Rich.

Re: Stammtisch in Frisco/Plano May 6th

2023-05-05T17:59:48.272000+02:00

I have an unplanned issue that will keep me away from DFW this weekend. I won't be able to attend this one, but look forward to the next -- maybe we can also do an informal get together around the CodeJam scheduled for June 16th?

Re: Code Jam by SAP Advocates on June 16th

2023-05-22T17:47:07.987000+02:00

There's still a few slots left if anyone else has been uncertain -- this will be your chance to meet and speak with both Tom Jung and Rich Heilman of the SAP Developer Advocates team.

Introducing: SAP’s Business Expert Insights Survey

2023-09-25T18:41:15+02:00

For the past four years, we have polled SAP Developers about tools and trends. Each year’s results have delivered perspectives that have helped us shape better programs for developers.

Building on that success, today we’re releasing a survey designed to gain insights from business professionals of all sorts. Someone maybe like you.It’s probably not surprising to read that business expertise extends much more broadly than software development. In constructing this survey, we spent considerable time discussing what subgroups to focus upon and which topics would be most valuable to explore. Essentially, if you have experience in business analytics, business processes, or business consulting this survey is designed for you.

Take the Business Expert Insights Survey Now

This is the first of what we hope will become a multi-year survey program. It’s a fresh area for us to explore and we’re excited to see what we might uncover. Please take the survey today – it should only take about ten minutes to complete. If you have thoughts about the survey you’d like to share, drop them in the comments section below and let’s discuss.

Thank you.

The 2023 SAP Business Experts Insights Survey: Charts, Findings, and More Charts

2023-12-08T16:01:12+01:00

This fall, we surveyed Business Experts in the SAP Community about the tasks the perform and the tools that they use. This blog post is a report on the survey results.

Introduction

SAP application implementation teams are composed of folks with a mix of skills. Developers are present, to be sure, but these teams also traditionally include functional business experts. These business experts provide knowledge that is essential to a successful implementation.

Earlier in the fall, we ran our first Business Experts survey. That survey is an offshoot of our annual survey of developers. We have consistently uncovered useful information through the developer survey and we were curious if we could find actionable insights about business domain experts.

Key Findings

We ran the survey for four weeks in September and October. We had 1,333 respondents. Of those, approximately 670 completed all questions in the survey.

We asked questions on a variety of topics: the tasks that business users perform, and the tools specific to such tasks. Data analytics and business process modeling were two such focus areas. Since this audience also might also be users of Low Code / No Code (LCNC) application development tools, we asked a series of detailed questions to respondents who said they'd been users of such technology.

Among the results we found most interesting:

Low Code / No Code application development is not yet clearly understood by many potential users – A portion of our survey explored Low Code / No Code tool familiarity and use. We approached this from an industry-wide point of view, not focusing exclusively on SAP products. Roughly half of respondents agree that they understand the concept behind LCNC application development. The remaining half did not. There is an opportunity to educate those folks who are unfamiliar.

Motivation for using LCNC app dev tools lines up well with analyst expectations – For folks who have worked with these tools, the top reason for starting a LCNC-base app dev project was, “I got results faster than if I’d waited for someone else to do the work.” (40%). Individual learning also was a factor here: “Doing it for the learning experience” came in second place (24%).

LCNC App Dev projects are generally considered successful – Of the respondents who developed and deployed LCNC applications, 73% of them agree that they believe the business outcome from developing the application themselves was better for their company than if someone else did the work.

But There is Relatively Low Activity of Among True Citizen Developers – only 4% of Customer respondents say they have developed a production LCNC app – while that number seems quite low, there is strong interest in exploring these tools (65%) among the same group.

Low Code / Node Code Tools are being employed more by Partner and Freelance Consultants – LCNC tools are not just for Citizen Developers – Pro-developers can and do use LCNC tools: Roughly 10% of respondents among Partners and Freelance Consultants say they have developed production LCNC apps. And where they have, they tend to produce significantly more applications per person than those from Customers.

LCNC app dev tools are quite popular as a simpler way to deliver Smartphone and Tablet apps - 56% and 37%, respectively, for all LCNC app dev projects that were part of the survey.

More Background

In the past, our team’s external research has focused on professional developers. A major part of that research has been invested in the annual SAP Developer Insights Survey (2023 report link)

With the introduction of the SAP Build portfolio in late 2022, SAP’s technology focus related to application development expanded to include support for Citizen Developers – folks completely outside Customer IT organizations and Partners. This expansion shifts the line where developer tools are relevant and it motivated us to explore LCNC products as part of this survey.

Results and Analysis

Chart Notation Used in this Report

We asked respondents to tell us about their relation to SAP. We use that in our analysis to help identify patterns. Customers, Partners, Freelance Consultants, and sometimes SAP employees all are represented in this report in different contexts. To be as clear as possible, we will include a legend to show which subgroups make up each chart’s source data.

Chart Notation

Respondent Demographics

SAP Community is composed of people from different organizations: Customers, Partners, and SAP employees all participate. We asked about this relationship:

For the remainder of this report, unless we state otherwise, employees of SAP will be excluded from all reporting. Excluding SAP employees from the same question gives us an idea of the external constituent groups:

From this we see that Customers make up about a third of our external community.

We also asked about the industry of their employer:

We asked about their age. We have no industry data applicable to business users to compare here, so we can’t draw any conclusion about the relative age of SAP business experts.

A breakdown of geography is consistent with our past surveys of SAP Developers.

Tasks Performed by Business Experts

Early in the survey, we asked a series of questions exploring the tasks performed as part of the respondent’s job. Within the survey, this task inventory was formulated in this way:

This series of questions listed thirteen task areas:

Data Analysis

Process Modeling

Project Management

Creating Business Cases

Requirements Gathering

Documenting User Stories and Use Cases

Stakeholder Management

Cost/Benefits Analysis

Quality Assurance

User Acceptance Testing

Risk Assessment

Market Analysis

Vendor Evaluation

The questions were composed to provide a simple gauge whether a task might be part of their role. We didn’t expect particularly accurate results if we asked a respondent to estimate the actual time or percentage of their work devoted to each task, so we limited responses to “significant”, “sometimes”, “rarely”, and “never”.

We guessed that responses from Customers might be different than from Partners, so we plotted each group independently:

Customer Tasks

Partner Tasks

The differences in these two charts are not dramatic. Some tasks that might be related more to consulting do appear more prevalent for Partners: Requirements Gathering, Creating User Stories or Use Cases, QA, UAT.

There’s an opportunity for deeper analysis here. For example, we might look at the tasks performed by specific job roles (we asked about roles later in the survey). Such analysis remains to be explored but, for now, what seems plain is that no task dominates when we group all business folks together.

From this point in the survey, we branched out into three distinct lines of questions. For those that said Data Analysis was part of their work, we asked about the tools that they use. We did the same thing for Process Modelers. And, since Low Code / No Code (LCNC) application development might be performed by anyone, we asked everyone a series of questions about their familiarity and use of LCNC application development products.

Analytics Tool Use

We composed a list of common tools representing a range of sophistication. Everything from basic tools like Excel to more elaborate, data science-oriented tools such as Python and R frameworks appeared in our list of choices. Respondents were asked to select all that they had used in the past year.

S/4HANA and ECC appear prominently in these results, as does SAP Analytics Cloud, and Business Objects.

Process Modeling Tool Use

As with Data Analytics, we chose a list of popular Process Modeling tools with a range of capabilities. Everything from Visio and Lucidchart – limited to visual mapping and flowcharting – to SAP Build Process Automation and SAP Signavio. We also included platform-specific offerings for comparison: Salesforce, and ServiceNow.

Visio comes in first, which might demonstrate that there’s an opportunity to convert such users to true automation tools. SAP tools figure prominently in the results, too. SAP Build Process Automation is not far behind Visio, in fact.

As follow-up research, it might be interesting to explore any overlap between those using simpler versus more automated tools: to what extent are folks using both? And – if so – why?

Low Code / No Code Application Development

We started with a basic question: does the respondent know what the terms Low Code / No Code mean?

So, 83% of our external audience have at least heard the term. Only half, though, feel like they completely understand. That’s an opportunity for education.

Of that 83%, we asked more questions. Do they think these tools might be relevant to them – or perhaps they have already jumped in and developed an application – here’s the breakdown:

There’s two points that stand out in this: first almost 60% of respondents express interest in these tools but have not yet explored them. Clearly that’s an opportunity to engage. Also, only 10% of the audience has actually developed an application (and that number is lower still when you consider that this is among the ~80% that said they’d been exposed to LCNC app dev, at least conceptually). Moreover, we are asking about LCNC app dev in general here. Given that LCNC application development tools have been in the market for quite some time, this calls into question how universally useful LCNC tools might be to business users.

For those stating that they had developed one or more applications, we asked a longer series of questions: How many of these applications have they developed in the last year? What tool did they use on their last project? What was their motivation and general experience?

LCNC Applications Developed - All non-SAP Respondents

Close to half the people in this group responded saying they had developed four or more applications. That’s an unexpectedly large number of applications per person. We are considering both Customers and Partners/Freelancers here. What if we just consider Customers?

LCNC Applications Developed - Customers only

So, Customer business experts are generating fewer applications in the same time span. That makes sense.

What about the most popular tools for Low Code / No Code application development?

SAP Build Apps comes in at the top by a comfortable margin. The ”Other…” response appeared prominently here and respondents were permitted to specify the unlisted tool. Those responses were:

SAP Analytics Cloud 2

Neptune Software 1

CAP (not an LCNC tool) 1

Boomi 1

BRFPlus 1

Another aspect worth noting is that the list of popular products was short. We had selected a list of thirteen candidate products to appear in the survey: most highly rated by analysts. Only four products appear more than once in the responses: SAP Build Apps (14), Microsoft Power Apps (3), SAP Analytics Cloud (2), and Mendix (2). Given the relative maturity of the LCNC product category, we would have expected more diversity in this list.

Target Devices

Many LCNC Tools provide out-of-the-box support for mobile phone or tablets. Was that a consideration here?

So, the answer is probably, “yes” – over half the apps were developed to target mobile phones. Significantly, tablets were a target over a third of the time.

Motivation for Using LCNC App Dev Tools

We were curious what factors motivated folks to develop their own app. We asked this question a couple of ways. First, we asked for the top three factors. We then asked which of those was most important. The most important factor stacked up this way:

Approved Product List?

In corporate settings, users sometimes are restricted to choose from a list of products that have been formally evaluated and pre-approved for use. We were interested in knowing if that was the case for LCNC app development products. We asked the folks who had developed an application:

Almost half said, “yes”. It’s a bit funny that almost a third reported that they were unsure if the company maintained such a list.

Required Development Interactions and Outcome

To be successful, reports from several industry analyst groups suggest that Citizen Developers will require active support and perhaps even some level of governance from traditional IT. We wondered how much this was happening and asked a few questions along these lines.

Finally in this line of questions, we asked whether the application builder felt the project was worthwhile:

Organizational Roles

Are there clusters of roles for Business Experts within an organization?

We asked each respondent to select the part of the organization where they work and the role within that organization. Here’s a breakdown. There’s probably a more detailed analysis that we could perform here. For example, you can see that Consulting Services and IT roles appear frequently. As we include Partners in this table, that is maybe no surprise.

Project Management 



Program Manager                        4



Project Manager                        3



Other                                  3



Project Analyst                        3



Project Engineer                       2



Project Coordinator                    1



Finance and Accounting 



Other                                 13



Financial Analyst                      8



Finance Manager                        4



Accounts Receivable/Payable Clerk      3



Accountant                             1



Payroll Specialist                     1



Consulting Services



Functional Consultant                 72



Technical Consultant                  54



Project Manager                       12



Business Process Consultant           10



Other                                  9



Consulting Services Manager            7



Management Consultant                  6



Business Development Consultant        3



Business Strategy Consultant           1



Information Technology 



IT Architect                          44



IT Specialist                         42



Software Developer                    32



IT Manager                            18



Other                                 17



Systems Administrator                  7



Research and Development 



Product Developer                      3



R&D Manager                            1



Other                                  1



Sales and Marketing 



Other                                  5



Sales Manager                          3



Marketing Manager                      2



Sales Representative                   1



Procurement and Purchasing 



Procurement Analyst                    5



Procurement Manager                    3



Supply Chain Analyst                   3



Other                                  3



Human Resources 



HR Specialist                          6



Other                                  6



HR Manager                             4



Production and Manufacturing 



Other                                  8



Production Manager                     2



Manufacturing Engineer                 2



Production Worker                      1



Supply Chain and Logistics 



Other                                  9



Supply Chain Manager                   5



Logistics Manager                      2



Warehouse Supervisor                   2



Inventory Specialist                   2



Security and Compliance 



Security Manager                       1



Administrative Services 



Administrative Assistant               1



Office Manager                         1



Quality Assurance and Control 



QA/QC Manager                          1



Quality Improvement Associate          1



Other                                  1



Strategic Planning 



Management Consultant                  2



Customer Service and Support 



Support Specialist                     3



Help Desk Technician                   1

Conclusions

This is our first iteration to survey this group within SAP Community. The response rate was good – primarily driven by web site intercepts. We called out several interesting patterns in the results and there are probably opportunities for both deeper analysis of this year’s data as well as opportunities to go deeper in future surveys of this same group.

Re: Dallas Community - 12/13/23 Stammtisch

2023-12-11T14:14:09.072000+01:00

I'll be there!

Re: End of 2023 - Stammtisch at Legacy Hall

2023-12-11T14:14:39.565000+01:00

I'm planning to be there!

2024's SAP Developer Insights Survey is Ready for You

2024-01-15T05:36:44+01:00

Attention SAP Developers!

The 2024 SAP Developer Insights Survey starts today and will be running for the next six weeks. It will take about twelve minutes of your time to complete.

2024 marks the fifth consecutive year for this survey. If you design, develop, or test software for SAP applications, platforms, or data: we have questions for you.

Take the 2024 SAP Developer Insights Survey now

The information we gather in the survey is important to us. It is a key resource we use to understand who you are and what you do. These data play an important role in shaping channels, programs, and to focus new content on your needs.

We also publish the results back to you. If you are curious, have a look at the report describing last year’s survey results.

The survey period begins today, January 15th. It will continue for six weeks, ending around March 1st. Our report on this 2024 survey will be released a few weeks after that.

Help us help the SAP Community. Your contribution is important.

Re: 2024's SAP Developer Insights Survey is Ready for You

2024-01-15T15:02:31+01:00

Hi Devraj,

Thank you for taking the survey and for your kind words. It's also been interesting to analyze the results that come back -- it has helped in on numerous occasions.

Riley