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Advisor
Advisor

Today we will go Behind the Scenes withdavid.metser a content editor and production team lead on SCN, dedicated to supporting the community. In a bold decision, juggling between his career and his family, he recently went back to school and is writing his thesis on knowledge management.


Dedi; please share a bit about yourself: I am married and have two sons. I live in Modi’in which is located between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. In my spare time I like to read, watch TV, and spend time with my family and sail.

I joined SAP almost 8.5 years ago as the production person (I uploaded the articles that the community submitted) and over the years I became the owner of the system we use to upload content, and became the production team manager.

Thinking about it, I do a lot of customer service as part of my daily work and I enjoy supporting the community in the different aspects of my work.

The picture to the right was taken in Florence. Dedi shared that to him, “there is something about Italy that makes you pace yourself …

The people, the culture the history the weather all of these make you want to stay…

Especially if you are in Tuscany.”

Tell us about your group and role: I have two hats: I am a Content Editor in the Content Team and also the team lead for the production team.

As a content editor I mostly help by building and engaging with the community with new spaces. Although it's a challenge that takes time and effort, building a community in a new space is a very rewarding task for me.

As the production team lead, we mainly upload articles to the library. My team was part of a few significant changes over the years, mostly when changes to all the overview pages were needed.

What brings you the most satisfaction from your role? The most satisfying task for me is solving a problem or shortening a manual task by taking an idea from the drawing table and driving it to implementation and success. Over the years I managed a few changes in the system we work on and built additional systems that saved a lot of time and effort on the backend on the one hand and improved the SLA to the community on the other hand.

Do you have a favorite SCN space? My favorite two spaces are the Portal and the BW because I have been the content editor of these spaces for more than five years now and become attached to them and to their space editors who became personal friends of mine.

Gali: Yep that’s what it’s all about, personal relationships built within the community!

What would the community be surprised to learn about you? I spent my honeymoon in the US doing a coast to coast trip and the last week was in Hawaii.

And how was it? It was an interesting experience and different from anything else you see in the US. Hawaii is as beautiful as the pictures.

Gali: I’d like to find out myself one day :wink:

Have you worked on any interesting project lately? The most recent one was migrating the download catalog to the SAP Store – ingvild.bayer and I worked on migrating all the content in order to improve the UI and the service both the stakeholders and the community is getting from the catalog – we are towards the end phase of building a web form for the download submissions which will improve the service the stakeholders will get when asking to have a new solution in the store in the spirit of simplifying processes.

Please help us grow from your personal experience; share one tip/ resource/ guide/ experience that you recommend after finding it helpful: When we migrated to the store we defined two countries for the SCN solutions - Germany and US. However, the downloads are free so anyone anywhere in the world can download them.

If you are not in either of these countries (like me) the simple solution would be to change the country and this will allow you to download the package.

The next four questions are taken from the Actor Studio interview questions:

What is your favorite word: OK

Least favorite word: can't

What sound do you love: The ocean waves

What profession other than yours would you love to attempt: History Research

As I know that you are a fellow book lover, can you share what your favorite book it? One of the books that drew me back again and again was "A Prisoner of Birth" by Jeffrey Archer.

The book has a lot of similarity to "The Count of Monte Cristo" but adds today's twists both on the street and in court, in ways that make you want to read it again and again…

You recently returned to academics, can you share a bit about that and how it's going? I started doing my master in Information Technology last October. Going back to school while working full time and raising a family is a challenge. I chose to do it in order to strengthen my professional knowledge.

How does it feel to go back to school? Sometimes the gap between the classes and the real world clashes, and it is different to do it now, after working in the industry for a few years. However, over the years I found out that I like writing and I like research so I guess doing my master was bound to happen…

Overall it's an experience I enjoy most of the time (not on exam mornings though) and I am planning to write my thesis on Knowledge management in English.

I love Dedi’s personal philosophy or motto: "It is the set of the sails, not the direction of the wind, that determines which way we will go."

The sailing theme continues in the team quotes below. They describe Dedi as a “captain at the helm of SCN’s content management systems “with a ready quip in Hebrew for any situation:

• “Dedi brings passion to everything he does, and he does it on behalf of all of SCN’s stakeholders and users. He is both thoughtful and decisive in how he approaches solutions, and the results of his work are a better and more user-friendly community. It’s a pleasure to work with Dedi because he is rational and considerate of what others need. “

• “Dedi has been at a steady captain at the helm of SCN's content management systems for a long time, managing through some of the stormy waters that come with platform changes and migrations. He's extremely resourceful, always eager to jump in to new projects, and full of ideas.

And I love how Dedi will always come up with an expression in Hebrew that captures whatever situation you happen to find yourselves in!

• “Dedi is a coach without knowing it, when doing a project he always looks so that all project partners get a win win situation. I like his humor mostly starting with: ‘You know in Hebrew we say …. For me Dedi is not only a colleague at work but a friend who really looks that you are feeling well.”

• “Dedi truly cares about his work. He has excellent attention to detail and creativity that helps us better support the Community.”

Follow Dedi’s tweets @dedim

I invite you to go ‘Behind the Scenes’ with additional SCN Team members.

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