I work for a well known media company where I live, a brand, our grad scheme is really good (disclaimer I'm a small part of that) and attracts the best of the best out of colleges, people like having my company on their CV, it doesn't do any harm, our allumni typically go on to have good careers, or stay for the long haul. We love it when our people take the skills we've honed into, for example, Amazon, JP Morgan and amazingly often return to the fold and are welcomed back with open arms. There isn't a prestige trap really, but maybe we just think we're the best of the best and going anywhere else is just for rounding out experience.
This sounds very much like the fraud/risk part of the business are not correctly joined up with the sales function. LEGO - you should have your guys talk to each other more often... maybe make Fraud/Risk a sign off on sales decisions?
My brother in law works in aerospace, he worked on a project which involved a mars mission - the catastrophic error was that part of the software worked in metric and part of it worked in imperial measures. Each independantly worked in factory testing, but together the imperial readings threw the metric system (it was just a number) - or vice versa - no one caught the error
I agree, empathy is a bit fake, you have to guess and I for one will do my very best to guess what others are thinking and feeling, but at the end of the day, being in someone else's shoes is a guess. Compassion is entirely solid though. Both are needed.
My concern with "compassion" is that you can have perfect "compassion" for an adversary you regard as "objectively evil": they may be evil but they're pitiful. Whereas "empathy", to my mind, calls upon you to strive for understanding, however imperfect — making it harder to dehumanize the adversary. But dehumanization tempered by compassion is still better than its pure, distilled form.
Instead of guessing how someone feels and what they are thinking, you can ask people what they're feeling and thinking directly. Sometimes people will tell you what they're feeling and thinking without you having to ask - then you can empathize with them just by listening. I think of "empathy" as a synonym for "understanding".
I'm pretty lousy at asking people what they feel, my job role, thankfully, has an optional people management component, I've opted out. However a mandatory (welcome) part of my role is mentoring, coaching, call it what you will. I need to listen to junior members of staff sharing their woes and it's a two way flow of ideas, they often share, or overshare their difficult life moments, and at that point, I hang up my "mentor" role and just listen, I'm not their manager, I'm just their colleage, in fact, their friend. Empathy, as I said is guessing, but I do everything I can to do my best guess
Don't be me - at work c. 2001 - heard about a colleague who was "vegetarian" but ate fish and sometimes chicken... I wanted to create a pseudo-scientific name for this way of eating. I was thinking something along the lines of eats some meat but predominantly vegetarian.
So I opened up google and typed "Latin meat" - the results did not translate to the latin for meat!
HR data is necessarily controlled though, there are pretty stingent controls in law around that. I understand the pain of not being able to report on stuff, but there is probably a sound reason. However, the delivery you describe sounds like a broken organisation tbh
No, this is the SAP business model. If people think that Apple, Sony, or Microsoft try to lock you in to their 'walled garden' then these people have never seen an SAP installation/integration.
It's almost its own industry. There are fleets of consultants charging ~$1000 a day just to install the system. Then, as the OP said, they charge by the hour for customised reports which means that businesses have to choose their report very carefully, and will probably need several more hours consulting when one aspect didn't work quite how they thought.
I would be surprised if the commenter here was someone who didn't already have access to the data. They are being frustrated by consultants who want to keep their billable hours up, and extraneously restricting access under guises such as "this person doesn't have enough training to touch the system," because it keeps them in paid work.
I'm not sure comparing walled gardens is that benefitial here. Most larger firms will either have consultancies on retainer or in-house personnel that can generate these reports anyway.
> They are being frustrated by consultants who want to keep their billable hours up, and extraneously restricting access under guises such as "this person doesn't have enough training to touch the system," because it keeps them in paid work.
I'm not sure why there's quite a few people pointing these aspects out in here. As opposed to the person using that data to keep their own billables up? "this person doesn't have enough training to touch the system," seems like a perfectly valid thing to say given what these systems do and is certainly not unique to SAP. The learning curve might be steep, the documentation looks ancient, the ecosystem might seem unapproachable, but at the end of the day this isn't that different to similarly scaled products from players like AWS or MS for example. They might have more approachable lower tiers and are nicer in quite a few technical aspects but other than that? It's often consultants and "certification or gtfo" as well. It's not like the consultant costs come as a surprise to anybody in these industries. Sure, it's their own little sub industry but you could say the same about these other ecosystems as well, that's not special - it is just how a few of these sub sectors are structured.
The difference between an SAP consultant, even on retainer, saying someone else can't do it because it's "too hard for them", and an employee being on the receiving end of that remark, is that the employee is an investment on the part of the company, the consultant is an expense. One is the equivalent of the programmer obfuscating his code to keep himself in a job, the other is an employee learning something new and becoming more valuable to the business.
I work in infrastructure an automation on the AWS/MS platforms and work with just about every level of their technical capabilities. I don't have any certification. I don't even have a university degree. I can work with the documentation, which is more often than not up to date and worthwhile. Though the curve is often steep, this doesn't mean it is beyond people with a careers worth of experience around the subject.
I have also learned a small amount about the sort of work involved in these custom queries from my friend. For the most part it's no more difficult than basic database administration; i.e. it's a query language, akin to SQL. It's difficult enough that I can see why someone would want training in it before touching a production DB. But from what I hear these consultants often work straight on Live and then rack up more billable hours fixing the mistakes they made with the customers' live data.
All of this is anecdotal, but the business model (essential monopoly) makes me squirm at the best of times.
Reminds me. I once wanted / needed a KPI to monitor consignment stocks. So I needed agregated inventroy numbers fo the past. Quite a simple calculation, SAP has stock movements and the current stock. So just plus / minus, right? The external devs wanted 70k € back in 2011/12 to put that into SAPs Business Warehouse. Not being able to programm ABAP myself, I went to my manager. He came up with a report, in the prodcution system, after 2 hours, half of it during his lunch brake.
https://imgur.com/a/NZuGTXU
However... This gallery on imgur gives a better idea of capability https://imgur.com/gallery/coWN44P