Simon Kemp is the SCN Member of the Month for October 2012. He is an SAP Consultant that has been in the SAP world all his career, even when he tried to escape once (read more about this in his Blog It Forward post). An “old" ABAPer and Portal expert, he is passionate about Mobility and User Experience. When I talked with Simon he was enjoying a beautiful afternoon in Australia, I could almost hear the bird singing and feel the early summer sun hitting his roof. I have to find a reason to take a business trip to Australia and visit him, John Moy, The specified item was not found., Martin English and many others on the other side of the world (is it really true that water runs down the sink the other way round in the South hemisphere? I don’t think I’ve ever been able to check).

Enough rambling. Simon is a community member you should know: He writes terrific blogs about events, it’s almost as if you had been there yourself. Of course he writes about technical stuff as well. He is passionate about beautiful software (a.k.a user experience a la Apple) and has simple, beautiful ethics.

Simon, can you tell us a bit about yourself, where you live, who you work for, and other things you would like to share with the community (hobbies, fun facts)?

I live with my wife and our two young sons in Manly New South Wales Australia; it is a seaside town 7 miles northeast of Sydney City Centre and as the saying goes “Seven miles from Sydney, a thousand miles from care!” – We are very lucky to live in such a beautiful spot.

I was born in Dublin, Ireland, moved to Switzerland as a teenager and then went to university in the UK (Scotland). My wife and I moved to Australia almost 10 years ago and are now proud Australian citizens.

I currently work for PLAUT Australia, a medium sized SAP services provider (about 150 people nationally), we specialize in Finance, HCM and Logistics including Manufacturing Intelligence and Business Intelligence solutions. I lead a practice that is dedicated to the SAP User Experience, I believe it is very important that SAP is not only great at what it does but that people find it easy and enjoyable to use – if people find a system “too hard” to use it will never deliver the benefits it was implemented to deliver.

My main hobbies are running, surfing and golf - although golf is taking a back seat while our boys grow up – it takes too long…so running and surfing are easier to fit into my schedule. When I travel for work it is easy to throw in a pair of trainers and you can run almost anywhere! Each year for the past four years I have run the annual City2Surf (14km run from Sydney City to Bondi Beach) and raised about $5000 for the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia (PCFA). The Nike+ app on my phone tells me I have run nearly 2300km in the last four years :-).

Note from Laure: Way to go Simon! Yeah, the Nike+ app is a great example of gamification. As Simon was telling me about his life in Australia I was trying to close my mouth and not make too many ecstatic sounds: Australia, beach, a house 700m from the water, summer just starting… Haaa I am envious! The Pacific Ocean here is way too cold for me.

When did you become a member of SCN and what brought you to this community?

I joined SCN a long time ago, I don’t even remember when exactly and my profile doesn’t reflect the exact date. It was way before TechEd Amsterdam in 2006, probably 2003 then. I still have an old SDN T-Shirt that I got at the Amsterdam event.

I haven’t been lucky enough to attend a TechEd since Amsterdam, that will change this year as I hope to go to TechEd in Bangalore in November. It is probably the closest and most affordable option from this side of the world.

I suppose I joined SDN (back then) because I was attracted to the community as a way to find answers and connect with people working in a similar area.

How does SCN help you in your daily activities?

There is a stack of information on SCN – sometimes you just need to find it! For sure SCN helps me sort out problems I encounter on the projects I work on – sometimes I will find an answer but if I don’t it is probably not a common problem and that forces me to look at my own unique environment and double/triple check what I have done. Often, I will come across a problem or topic and remember reading about it before on SCN.

SCN also provides me a way to be involved in a vast number of interesting projects and interact with people who are facing interesting and challenging problems. It gives you exposure to the world. Even if you’re not working on something you can read about it and learn. So if I ever get bored there is always an interesting puzzle to help someone solve on SCN!

Helping others helps me. It’s not until you try to explain something to someone else that you realize how well you understand a topic yourself. Don’t be afraid to give away your knowledge/IP. You get much more back by giving it away.

I would just like to mention that the SCN search has recently been vastly improved – I gave up on the old SDN search years ago and until recently only used Google with a site:sap.com filter to find things. But all that is changing now and more and more I find myself turning to the great new SCN search… if you haven’t tried it recently you need to!

How do you find the time to contribute to SCN?

No doubt that is tough, but there is always a spare 5 or 10 minutes here and there – it is good to take a break from your day to day work and jump onto SCN. Or in the evening instead of watching TV! If something matters to you, you manage to find the time :-) It’s about prioritizing.

I usually start my day early around 7am in the office so I set aside 15 – 20 minutes to eat breakfast and take a look at SCN, read some blog posts and answer some forum questions.

I see you also blog on your company Plaut’s web site. Impressive! How do you tailor the content to your different audiences? And do you have advice for fellow bloggers who are active on multiple platforms?

If something is relevant to our customers and to the SCN then I will re-use some of the content in both places. I would recommend this approach as I believe your readers will appreciate that you have taken the time to adapt something for them. Your customers may not have as much background information or technical knowledge as the people in this community [SCN]. And if you want to track your success on a different blogging platform you can use Google Analytics to see how you’re doing in terms of page views. I noticed that my blogs around events are popular.

That's Simon (left) on his company's web site. Cool, isn't it?

Who is the blogger you like to read most?

I like blogs that have a story line, I find it much more interesting to read. I have worked with SAP Mentor John Moy in the past and have always enjoyed spending time discussing topics with him, as it turns out John also writes fantastic blog posts which I enjoy reading very much. They are carefully crafted and provide a lot of details.

What do you like most about the community in general?

I love the collaboration opportunities and vast knowledge base that the SCN community brings with it.

I like the fact that people from across the globe can help each other and publish their knowledge and views.

I love it when a topic, blog or question sparks off a healthy debate and you really see in people’s interaction how much they care about a topic – and how much passion they bring to the discussion.

Notes from Laure:

Yes, in the team we also like healthy debates. And when they are really good they really got us going and talking about it ;-)

On the phone Simon and I started a discussion around SCN, the platform and the recent changes. Simon spoke enthusiastically about the “new” SCN, the blogging platform improvements, etc. He likes the new search, the way you can filter by categories. He was also having issues with logging in but he implemented a client certificate in IOS and now it’s working smoothly. I told him he should definitely share his tips in a blog. Who knows, it may help others and bring him from MoM fame to super star fame! Now you have to blog about it Simon!

In your blog about the Mastering SAP event in Sydney, you mentioned that someone said “SCN is geared toward technical community, it needs more functional people engaged”. What would you recommend in order to attract more functional and business people active into the community? And by the way do you know about the SCN Space SAP Business Trends and do you think it can contribute to that goal?

I hadn’t noticed the Business Trends space before – it looks interesting. The description reminded me of what Steve Jobs used to say about Apple being at the crossroads of technology and art, perhaps this space is at the crossroads of technology and business :-) I will start following it for sure. Once it gets a critical mass, people will see the value and they will be drawn into the discussion.

Hummm… how to attract more business and functional people, that is a great question! I’m not sure I have a great answer. Ultimately people need to see the value in the community for themselves. In the same way philanthropists gain great pleasure in giving away their money and helping others, contributors on SCN share their knowledge and can feel good about it by helping others. I think you have to experience that to really “get it”. I hope that step-by-step the functional community will reach a critical mass, realize the value and then it will be unstoppable.

In the functional arena there may be some reticence to share because people feel like they are giving away their Intellectual Property and somehow making themselves less valuable… in rare cases this may be true, but generally I think this is a misconception and the more you give the more you will benefit yourself.

In addition to ABAP Development, SAP for Mobile, and SAP NetWeaver Portal, what are the other areas of SCN that you follow and like to get updates from?

Anything to do with the User Interface and User Experience of SAP is of interest to me. I like to follow the UI Development Toolkit for HTML5 a.k.a SAPUI5 space as well as the User Interface Technology space. I’ve noticed a shift in SAP’s UI technology strategy, they are working to embrace the community standards, they are opening up now. This is great.

I have a huge interest in mobile.

ABAP and Portal are areas I started off with, but I’m less active now. I still spend some time in SCN’s Portal space though.

If a new member came to you and asked for your advice on how to be an active and respected member of SCN, what would you say?

I would say they should jump right in and get started, don’t be afraid to give it a go, you don’t have to be the world’s most esteemed expert on a topic to add value. In the forums for example sometimes it just helps someone to talk through the issue or problem they are facing; it can spark other ideas and possible solutions.

(I like that perspective!)

Even if you don’t have the exact answer you can help people by giving them possible next steps or strategies to try. I liken it to the old adage of “Give a man a fish and he will feed his family for a day, but teach him to fish and he can feed his family for a lifetime”.

Be yourself, be open and honest and people will appreciate that.

Is there an SCN member you admire (OK… you can name a few)?

There are so many great SCN members, I have already mentioned John Moy but all of the SAP Mentors on SCN are worth a “follow” in my opinion.

I think the people who are active in the forums on a regular basis and who give back to the community by helping others are worth mentioning here also – they are in it for the long haul.

What technology do you think is most exiting at the moment? It can be SAP related or not, business or leisure.

It has been said that “the future is all around us, it is just not evenly distributed yet” – there are so many exciting technologies appearing that are going to change our world in the future (and are already changing it in a small way now). I recently attended an Amazon Web Services event in Sydney and they had a case study of a cancer research company who by using AWS were able to reduce their R&D cycle times and costs by orders of magnitude! That’s amazing and will ultimately save people’s lives. This type of industry can be changed forever with such technologies. If HANA can power stuff like that, that could change the world.

Other technologies like “The Internet of Things” and 3D Printing are also very exciting areas that will open up vast new opportunities.

Easy question: Mac or Windows?

Pass… :-) I use Windows daily for work and carry an iPad and iPhone. I have a desire to use a Mac but mainly just because I like to learn new things. I am a bit torn on this issue as there is something about Apple's “closed ecosystem” model that doesn’t sit right with me, but I have to admit that by controlling hardware and software they seem to deliver a superior experience.

PC’s are quickly being surpassed by phones and tablets and are becoming more like consumer appliances – this is great for normal users for sure and Apple seem to be leading this.

Are you on Twitter?

Yes, you can follow my ramblings @skemp

Is Angus really your middle name? ;-)
(for those who wonder how I found that out, just look at Simon’s LinkedIn profile url)

Och aye lassie (not sure Google translate will work on this, but just ask any Scotsman or woman to translate!) My grandfather was Angus and my eldest son also has Angus as his middle name – that must by our Celtic heritage :-)

(nice!)

Every month, a member of the SAP Community Network is recognized for exemplary behavior: sharing knowledge with peers, being helpful and taking on additional tasks to support community engagement. See the list of previous SCN Members of the Month.

Blog It Forward

Thank you Greg Chase for 'BIFfing' me in your Blog It Forward part. BIFfing, a term that for sure has got nothing to do with Back To The Future's Biff Tannen, but is all about introducing yourself to the SCN community. An initiative started by Moshe Naveh that leads to a great, worthwhile reading, blog roll here on SCN.

Intro Twan

Van FS2012 BlixemQuizzz

Well then, here we go. A long, long time (1995) ago I started as an ABAP youngster in the SAP world. Originally I planned to become a logistics consultant, which would be in line with my business administration study. But I really enjoyed - and still do - being in the creative development world. Especially when SAP NetWeaver got introduced, the job got even more attractive. Currently I mostly act as solution architect for customers. Being involved in defining a flexible architecture for now and the future is a challenge that really makes my day. Talking to business representatives to understand their needs and translating that into solutions. My current weeks are filled with two customers that want to step into the world of Enterprise Mobility.

Greg about Twan

For the well awake reader you probably noticed that I didn't write anything on Java. That's because I don't have any experience there. Sorry Greg, but I have to rectify that. But with all the SAP NetWeaver Cloud stuff I really think I need to get a crash course Java. Anyone any suggestions?

With all the new possibilities that are brought to our SAP lives, it is even more important to really understand what the business wishes are and to deliver these wishes fast - light speed fast. Since early 2009 I have worked with scrum within SAP projects and - allow me to say so - I am really enthusiastic on this topic. More experiences on scrum and SAP here on SCN and on my blog.

Twan about Twan

How to describe myself? I am a community guy. Within the company borders I try to bring together likewise minds to share knowledge and experience to come up with new ideas and innovations. If you ask about my passion - here you have it. Bring people together. Fortunately there are more people that think alike. That's how I ended up within the SCN community. All the credits go to Marilyn Pratt for that. She reached out to me at SAP TechEd in 2007 and connected me to Richard Hirsch, as a result I got involved in a BPX community project. Dick, Owen and others simulated a project via collaboration tools as Messenger, SDN and Wiki's.

Next were the community days as a prequel to SAP TechEd. Events that later got decoupled from SAP TechEd and renamed to SAP Inside Tracks. Great initiatives that I wanted to bring to the Netherlands as well. I started SAP Inside Track in the Netherlands in 2009. Last year this community event was attended by 75 enthusiasts. "Learn by sharing" is the main theme again at our 4th SAP Inside Track NL (#sitNL) where we gather around to share The SAP TechEd XPerience.

Enough for the business part. Who am I really? I am a proud father of 3 kids, 2 boys (1999, 2003) and a daughter (2006). And together with my wife I'm really happy to be able to raise a healthy family. I enjoy to make pictures and quite often I combine that with my SAP life as I bring my camera to all kind of SAP events .

Even at home I like to act as a community guy. Once a year we organize a 3 day festival for kids, teens and their parents. Dance, Sport, Quiz, Music and a lot of fun. During that weekend I really love to act as a DJ and host and you can see me using my presentation machine in a different way.

Van FS2012 Zeskamp	Van FS2012 Vrijdag

We live in Eindhoven, which brings me to the next topic.

Fun facts Eindhoven

Eindhoven, a city in the southern part of the Netherlands. World famous for being the birth place of Philips.

Also famous for a UFO like congress center, the Evoluon. Which actually started as a Philips museum in its first years.

And when you're in the neighborhood this month, check the "Lichtjesroute".

Questions

1. What do you do to build bridges

(A bridge near the Philips High Tech Campus that changes its colors at night)

Initially I wanted to answer: with Lego of course. But I guess Greg meant something different

Bring in your expertise and reach out. In the fast changing business and IT world it is important to collaborate. You can only do so if you reach out to each other and combine your knowledge. Don't throw requirements or wishes over the wall, but get together and work on the same goals. Needless to say that I recommend using scrum to facilitate the collaboration within your projects.

2. What is your philosophy of innovation and how do you help others to innovate

Innovation is not only done in a lab environment where new products are invented and brought to the market. Innovation is also the combination of existing solutions into a new one. People that look beyond borders, think out of the box, come up with innovative ideas. They see customers struggle in their daily life and come up with a solution to support them. That can be an SAP solution or they see a third party solution and come up with the idea to combine that with SAP.

Within a company you can only facilitate innovation by giving freedom to thoughts and activities. Not in a way that every Friday afternoon is reserved for innovation. No, if you have an idea, describe it on a one pager with expected deliverables and required time. And off you go, reserve time in your workweek, don't visit your customer for 40 hours/week, but spend time on your own innovation project as well.

3. How will you leave the world a better place?

Respect! Only one word that can save a lot of lives here on our planet. Respect your fellow colleagues, customers, family members, neighbors, people from different countries with different religions or different thoughts.

Respect the one world we have and the people living on it. Don’t do anything with or to somebody else that you don’t want to happen to yourself.

Sounds very easy, but in practice very difficult - apparently. As a father I will be very happy when our kids show respect to others and when they are respected in return.

Next in the Blog It Forward line

• Leo van Hengel, who is a real SAP NetWeaver wizard. There isn't anything he can't build, fix or connect together. Really happy that Leo and I got selected for this year's SAP TechEd DemoJam with our Garbage Collector.
  
• T. Castelijns, Ted, another colleague at Ciber who shares enthusiasm on portals and user interfaces. With the announcement of the Cloud Portal, you know what topic he sits on right now
• John Astill, fellow SAP Mentor whom I met at last year's InnoJam in Madrid. He won DemoJam 2011 in Madrid with Home Carbon Challenge, a unique green entry (John starts at 50:12). This year he coaches a team of middle school children and they came up with a Food Agent app, a food safety database.
• Nigel James, fellow SAP Mentor who co-organized the first community day in London that wasn't connected to SAP TechEd. Nigel gave me some very handy tips in setting up and organizing the first SAP Inside Track NL.
• Darren Hague, fellow SAP Mentor who was the other co-organizer of the community day in London. Currently heavy involved in transforming a dinosaur into a spaceship.

Please answer the following questions

1. What is your philosophy of innovation and how do you help others to innovate

2. What is the project that you are most proud of in your SAP life

3. If you had plenty of time next to your SAP career, what other career would you like to start (or did you already start)

Thanks for making it to the end, again I really like to recommend the other blogs in this chain.

In our About Us space, we are providing advice to members of SAP Community Network who want to get more deeply engaged. In my opinion....

....these days, the BEST way to get more deeply engaged with members of the SAP Community Network is to add a connection or two to our major social media channels – Facebook, Twitter, Linked In and You Tube. The format of each of these channels can add dimensions to your interactions with other members – the rapid, conversational pace of Twitter exchanges, the career-building focus of Linked In…you know the story.

But, you say - the new SCN platform allows for much more immediacy that it used to. So why do we need these social extensions too?

My point of view: Our members are on these Twitter, Facebook and other social sites, “in conversation” with other professionals on topics related to SAP, enterprise software, careers, training, expert tips and more. So, SAP’s SCN community team should be there too, sharing what we know and the content on our site. We realize that your important conversations won’t always be on SCN.

"Getting some great insights to #SCN from @markyolton - so much thought leadership in this network! Way before its time..." - Ben Johnson, Marketing Manager: Services & Solutions ANZ Region SAP,Twitter, May 7, 2012

Many of our most active members seamlessly weave participation in SCN and our social channels together – it’s a big part of the daily chatter. Connections deepen here, as everyone from newbies to power users meld their SAP world with the rest of their social networks.

We have large followings on these channels:

Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/sapcommunitynetwork

40,000 likes

See Most Popular SCN Facebook Posts from Aug 2012

http://scn.sap.com/community/social-media/blog/2012/09/12/the-top-sap-facebook-posts-from-august-2012

Twitter (@sapcomment, #SCN)

https://twitter.com/SAPCommNet

15,000 followers

See Top @sapcommnet Tweets from July 2012

http://scn.sap.com/community/social-media/blog/2012/08/10/top-tweets-from-sapcommnet-for-july-2012

Linked In

http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=80937&trk=myg_ugrp_ovr

13,000 members

You Tube

http://www.youtube.com/user/SAPCommunities/featured

215,000 views

So how do you get started connecting with SAP’ers and SCN members?

Try these lists for starters:

• For SAP Mentors the best link is this: https://twitter.com/SAPMentors/following
• List of SAP employee Twitter handles:  https://community.wdf.sap.corp/sbs/docs/DOC-3861
• SCN employees – Chris Kim’s Twitter list:   https://twitter.com/i/#!/ceekim/sap-disco-team/members
• Here’s a good list of 500 from Michael Brenner:  https://twitter.com/i/#!/BrennerMichael/sap-folk

I’ll see you on Twitter…..let us know what this adds to YOUR SAP Community experience.

A couple of weeks ago, Hendrik Neumann, a colleague at my current client, BIF’ed me. Thank you for that. No, really, thank you. No sarcasm…

If you don’t know the “Blog It Forward Community Challenge” by Moshe Naveh yet (isn’t true, is it?), read more here and the whole chain you can find here .

First I thought about writing about Introverts (because I think the word is invented for me), learning English the hard way (never used the language for 20 years before I became a SAP Mentor last year) or time management as IT professional (how to handle professional life, self-education, family, me, and in which order). Finally I’ve decided not to do so, because either there are already well written blogs about these topics (e.g. http://scn.sap.com/community/social-media/blog/2012/09/13/introverts-and-extroverts--who-cares ) or the topics deserve own blogs.

Home town(s)

Düsseldorf, Germany

My first 30 years I’ve lived in the beautiful small capital of North Rhine Westphalia, Düsseldorf.

License

The city is famous for its Carneval (Dusseldorf does carnival like no other), for its music (Kraftwerk, Die Toten Hosen, Propaganda and many others), home of my favorite sports clubs (Fortuna Düsseldorf [football] and http://www.deg-eishockey.de/ [icehockey]) and has of course the worlds best beer.

Fun fact: Düsseldorf is (probably) the only city in the world with a train station called “Zoo” without even having a zoo.

Neuss, Germany

Twelve years ago I’ve moved to the other side of the Rhine River in the even smaller city called Neuss, founded by the Romans in 16 BC, the home of Tempo (the inventor of paper tissues, the European version of Kleenex) and Maoam.

From “Schinderhannes, the robber of the Rhine (1833)”
http://archive.org/stream/schinderhannesro00ritcuoft#page/306/mode/2up

The band of Creveldt, or of Neuss, as it was
afterwards called, although almost as strong in num-
ber as that of Mersen, was quite different in tactics.
Force was no part of their plan when it could possibly
be avoided ; and, till they were joined by Mathew
Weber, surnamed Fetzer, the ram was never used
at all.

...

Fetzer was executed at Cologne, and would have
died, to all appearance, penitent, but for the fol-
lowing brief conversation he held with his confessor,
a few moments before the fatal ceremony.

" O that I had my liberty but for two hours !"
exclaimed the bandit-chief.

" And what would you do with it, my son ?"

" I would commit the finest robbery that ever
was heard of ! — But you do not know for what pur-
pose," added he, his eyes glistening, and his voice
quivering. " There is a child — a little girl — the
only being I love in the world, who will fall into
ruin and beggary when I am gone. If I could but
leave enough to secure her a good education among
the Ursulines of Cologne!"

...

The execution took place on the 21st of Novem-
ber, 1803, when twenty heads were cut off in
twenty-six minutes.

Exactly 199 years later on this date, my son was born (the goalie below).

Fun fact: everybody (at least in Germany) knows the Inbus-Key (or the wrongly pronounced shortform “Imbus”), but just a few people know what the name stands for. It is the tool which is delivered with all the Ikea furniture (in the rest of the world you know it as Hex Key or Allen Key).

The tool was patented 1936 by the Neuss based company called Bauer & Schaurte, and “Inbus” is just the Acronym for „Innensechskantschraube Bauer und Schaurte“.

BIF questions by Hendrik Neumann

If you could be a super hero (or are in your spare time) who would you be?

1. Thomas Jung : because he has the superpower to absorb all the interesting projects (and to teach us the stuff he learned the fun way)

2. Marilyn Pratt : if I would be Marilyn, I wouldn’t have to think about “What would @marilypratt do?”, I would just do it

Favorite activity that has nothing to do with SAP?

Skaterhockey (see above photo).

What gives you inspiration for your professional live?

Motorbiking. Why? The silence. No radio, no phone, no people. Just me and my mind, my thoughts, or sometimes just nothing.

Blog it forward

The question I want to ask my friends and project team mates Ivan Femia and Abdulbasit Gulsen is coming from my beloved wife Doris and has nothing to do with SAP:

What has your Mum cooked for you as a child (the everyday meals, not the special ones)?

See you at #sapteched Madrid

You can reach me via Twitter or G+

Thank you Thomas Zloch, Tammy Powlas, and Moshe Naveh for encouraging me to write a few words about myself. Looks like I got pulled into the Ponzi (or a chain letter, depending on your perspective) scheme.

Part of Blog It Forward Initiative.

<random ramble>

I first heard about SAP when I was an accountant at Gartner Group in 1997. After reading their research reports about Peoplesoft, Oracle, BAAN, and SAP, it was clear to me that SAP was the leader in ERP (I'm not sure if the term had existed then or not). Over the years I made the transition into IT and though not always 100% hands on with SAP it was always part of my professional life, whether at KPMG or IBM, companies where I really learned the IT finance trade.

I have been independent for about five years now and even though SAP implementations cannot be done by one person, I consider myself a solo practitioner - a term I have borrowed from my fellow CPA's.

I grew up in a small town in Western Poland, some 100 miles east of East Berlin - a divided city until I left for America in 1989. All I can say about it is that it was very small where big dreams were born and I like to see it at this point in history of which I wasn't aware when I was growing up there.

Even though the 70's and 80's were dark times under the communism, they were the best times as I was growing up and trying everything for the first time (good and bad). I was a harcerz (coeducational scout), Pele was my hero, and I wanted to be a cosmonaut. When I was a teenager I was in East Germany quite often and enjoyed my vacations there (Berlin, Leipzig, Jena, and some smaller towns and villages). Mostly, they were working vacations. This is how I learned to speak a little bit of German (which now is very, very rusty) but had more than a few opportunities to botch my interpretations:

Those summer trips were probably what drew me to SAP early in my career. I always enjoyed studying grammar (or later linguistics) and didn't realize how closely related Karl Marx and Noam Chomsky were as I didn't care about their leanings but rather how their ideas made it to the study of language (or even computing). Even though I like history, international politics, and religion, I am aware of some very painful chapters that each of them has, but which I have, for the most part, avoided, so far.

Now, I live in a town 100 miles northeast of New York City, my new home for half of my life. So, now you can figure out how old I am. My current town is home to an IBM site (please don't close the site as my home value will plummet) and to Чураевка, which while much less auspicious, is looming very large for everyone who had anything to do with Russian culture (but which has no impact on local real estate prices).

I came to the US to study business and to verify all the propaganda I was surrounded with when growing up in Poland. This was a natural continuation of my college education I had started at Uniwersytet Warszawski and Szkoła Główna Planowania i Statystyki at the time. It sounds funny now, but I decided not to go back and to interrupt college based on the result of tossing a quarter coin. So, it's a pure luck that I'm here. I was choosing between continuing my education at the Universität des Saarlandes or staying here and starting from scratch. Well, the real reason behind this is my wife's family that helped us survive the first tough years (a typical Polish American immigrant story, repeated with every new generation) and eventually, I did manage to get my MBA at University of Connecticut.

Since I got this blog entry brought forward through the back channels I can just answer one challenge question that was asked. I don't know why Marilyn Pratt would call me an SCN fanboy (I think used the term "groupie") as there many more fanboys and fangirls around here, but I appreciate her inclusiveness and trying to build an empathic community on line and going in a very natural way about it. We are building something new and hopefully better here, even though the ugly divisions along language, hierarchy, knowledge, and others from "real off-line" life sometimes make their way to our second (online) world, but we keep them in check, don't we?

I must admit that I'm a lifelong learner and even though I enjoy drawing benefits from my degrees, certifications, training, etc. I realize they are but a necessity to remain competitive in the marketplace and sometimes the promised benefits never get realized or investments turn out a bust, so I just keep on trying. I appreciate SAP providing me with this opportunity just like my previous employers and clients have in the past. The software is complex, so we get paid to make it simpler for others to use. Have we reached the 2 million SAP Note number yet? I especially welcome the HPI initiative to open the in-memory education to the worldwide audience. Even though I may not pass the tests and the exam, I'm already appreciating the savings that are possible when HANA is actually implemented. I also like the interaction with other students, which is becoming another online community of sorts - a future education model for my two daughters.

Ok, I enjoy watching Seinfeld and Big Bang Theory.

</random ramble>

Here are my blog it forward requests: Jim Spath (who "knew" me before we had actually met), Jon Reed (who built SAP online community before there actually was one), and Vitaliy Rudnytskiy (who left the bustling of Silicon Valley and now does SAP from Wrocław (Breslau), Lower Silesia.

My apologies to others, but I think most of you have already created the BIF blogpost.

My questions to all three are:

1. If there was no SAP, which software would you use to balance your ledger?

2. If there were no computers, how would you communicate about IT?

3. If you were to choose a college degree today, which field would you choose and why?

Thanks for reading.

From the very moment when Moshe Naveh introduced the new challenge I knew that it will reach me some day. Still I wasn’t prepared as Thomas Zloch made my fears become true. Thomas, I really thought you are a Pole.

Now you can read everything you never wanted to know about me * but were not afraid to ask.

I was born in the last millennium, In that year The Beatles performed in Hamburg,  John Wayne filmed Hatari and Juri Gagarin was the first man in space.

At least personalities that accompanied during my life. I am proud to have an almost complete John Wayne Movie collection, Beatles songs make me relax and light (but I do not even own one album) and Space Opera is a preferred lecture that makes my dreams fly (even I am realistic enough that for the sake of money only robots will enjoy space travelling in the next few hundred years). Actually I never read about SAP in a Science Fiction, seems business software is not important in future :-)

I grew up in a farm house, just 50 meter away from school, never had a chance for truancy.

My mother always said: Boy, learn learn learn, or you become as well a farmer and have to work outside in all weathers. I listened and followed. 

 
See info about the town I grew up: http://www.breitenbach-hessen.de/unserdorf.html

After having survived middle school I took a 3 year apprenticeship for industrial clerk, followed by a few months in
marketing.  Then an American influenced my life: He was accountant, made a colleague pregnant and escaped back home…and
I became an accountant.

In case you think I tell you fairytales, maybe, maybe not. My environment invites, because close to my hometown and actually my first working place is in Steinau an der Strasse, where the living place of the famous Brother Grimm was:

I skipped military service, did 10 years civil protection instead, probably a long-term impact of the 69’s and the Hippie
movement.

The first contact with IT was a Commodore 64, which I sold again after 2 months and swore never to work with computers. 

I broke this swear and was the first with an IBM PC and Lotus 1-2-3 in the company. 

End of the 80s we implemented our first integrated system for materials management and production planning and execution, as well as accounting and product costing, as replacement for our magentic card accounting system.
The software was not error free, and I started reading the source code for corrections. This was the starting point of my IT career, a chance to get rid of the accountant in me.

So I took RPG training during the day and studied business economist in the evening, had an implementation project for a year in
a sister company, and a  few years as a system admin and programmer with an IBM S/38 and AS/400 system. 

The company was sold, year 2000 already seen at the horizon, and I was asked to join for 2 months an international team in New York area to do a business design. At that time I had not spoken English for 20 years.

However, 2 months became a year in New York, followed by a year in Antwerp, and a year in various places all over Europe to implement SAP.

Somehow, I found time in these busy times to find a wife, married her on short notice, bought the rings in Brussels, married at
home town in Germany, and next day we were in Italy. She enjoyed sun and beach, while I had a Go-Live with our Italian subsidiary and to fix our beginner errors till late in the night. So my wife got used to my absence very early.

The company got sold again, actually in parts to competitors, and I was asked to help splitting the system, archive and scramble
the data. So I added to my Materials Management and Inventory management skills some more in data archiving (while I still feel young – at DSAG archiving days I always have the impression Data Archiving is the end of Life Cycle )

The system split was followed by the first SAP system merger and I found myself in Data cleansing and preparation for data load in
Hopewell Virginia, a town without a sidewalk. My wife had to stay at the hotel, only 500 meters away from a shopping center, but impossible to get there without car, the last time she came with me for a project. Maybe it was not caused by the sidewalk…a little later my daughter was born.

  And the carrousel turned faster. The company merged with another, IT got reorganized (at that time it was only once in three years – nowadays it almost the other way around: 3 times a year) . I moved closer to Hanau, the birthplace of the Brother Grimm and work in Darmstadt now, a 60 km drive which gives me the opportunity to listen audio books.

Darmstadt is the City of ESA (European Space Agency).The loop to the Science Fiction from the beginning of the blog is closed; in a Hollywood movie would this be the end. In a SAP project only the Go-Live, which just means, budget is exceeded and you are right in the middle.

So let’s move on and try to get some of the obvious questions answered.

I joined SDN in 2005, seeking for information, kept being calm for many years as many questions were really too difficult for me…
actually I was busy as a moderator in another SAP forum. But then SDN vacuumed this forum, eventually it did it by itself with too much advertising. Isn’t that interesting, companies come to crowded places to sell their stuff and actually cast out potential buyers.

Back to SCN.  It is really a wonderful place to get information. You can find answers to almost every question.  If everybody would search before asking, then we would not see any question in the forums for many weeks.

Gali Kling Schneider made me a moderator for MM forum end of last year. MM is a hobby, I am actually working as SD consultant (Don’t be afraid G Lakshmipathi, I am not going to make my points there),  but most of my time I am doing
special  projects like data migration and data archiving, Warehouse Management implementations and data harmonization and
Small Company Rollouts.

My work became a hobby, as I am relatively free to decide from where I work and when, just how long I work is restricted by our work council, one of the last SAP free areas in a company, maybe that’s the reason why the still have their old-fashioned boundaries. And I am a redundant violator when I have my migration projects and load data for many weeks around
the clock. 

Many questions listed in http://scn.sap.com/community/about/blog/2012/08/20/blog-it-forward-community-challenge
are already answered without having named them explicitly. I had and still have fun in many projects, implementing inventory management or warehouse management is always a bit more fun as warehouse people do rarely speak English, and I
nothing else than German and English – okay I became fluently in Italian cuss words with the roll-out there.

Stations of my life

I don’t need to think about what superhero I would like to be, colleagues already name me “THE MIGRATOR” becasue of my data migration projects , but I could easily become The Punisher if this GRC hype and the restriction of authority continues to block my migration activities.

If you are curious about where I am actually working, then see one of our funny commercials: Baby  or James Bond or Cleaning or Vampires or Viagra or Elephant or petrol can  

I'd like to "blog it forward" to Dogboy 49 , a resource who  fills my knowledge gaps in PP area,  and Arminda Jack who has
her  avatar picture with such a beautiful smile and relaxing pose that I always enjoy seeing a post from her.

Hi everyone,

I am Maya Urman Bahar.I recently returned from maternity leave to SAP labs Israel, and upon my return was delighted to learn that a chain of personal blogs from our beloved community was being formed.  Patiently, I waited until my turn would come, and I am so happy to finally be part of this amazing “Blog It Forward" initiative.

First, a great thanks to Katya Shmuel, who not only successfully filled in for me while I was away, but was also nice enough to invite me to participate in the

“Blog It Forward" challenge.

It has been more than 5 years since I started working for SAP and became part of the SAP Community family. It has been quite a journey and I am still as enthusiastic and motivated as the day I first stepped into the office.

A big part of that has to do with my great colleagues, but more than that is the fact that I am lucky enough to be working for a team which is not afraid to take risks and explore new frontiers . When SDN was founded, in 2003, social media was not common practice for a large corporation. In the last years, as part of the Business and Solution Team, I got to play a great role in designing and creating the future of SCN.

Just recently, I had a chance to embrace innovation and adopt cutting edge technology.  I helped create a revolutionary business analytics solution, based on the SAP HANA technology and newly released graphical tools, such as exploration view and mobile BI.  It was a thrilling experience, seeing ideas become reality.

This leads me directly to Katya’s question:

1. What is your personal life dream?

I consider myself an entrepreneur at heart and I would really like to found a startup company sometime in the future.

As an Israeli, this is really not an unusual dream. I come from a country, which produces more cutting edge technology per capita than any other population. Our culture encourages taking risks and innovation and we are considered a true start up nation.

I think a product manager is an entrepreneur within an organization. Each product is a chance to realize a dream, be it large or small. You have to follow your vision through and through, traveling a bumpy road. To get there, you will need to overcome obstacles, question givens and come up with original solutions. But the joy of reaching the destiny is totally worth the effort.

2. What are your most significant achievements in life (both personal and professional)?

My biggest achievement, no doubt, is my family.  I have 3 beautiful children and they are my greatest accomplishment.

Balancing my career with raising small children is very fulfilling. I take pride in being able to do both and still find time for hobbies and leisure (I run 10ks 3 times a week, go hiking with my family and spend time with friends).

My secret is that I don’t need much sleep ;-)

3. What is the best lesson your parents taught you?

Set objectives and try to reach them. When you have a target, it sets direction and helps you get somewhere even if you do not necessarily achieve your goal. It is ok to change your purpose over time, but always have an aim.

With that I will continue the chain, blogging it forward to:

Jacob Klein

Safeer Mohiuddin

Daniel Wroblewski

Matt Johnson

1)     Iris Asheri

I am very curious to know:

1. What would you consider to be your ideal job, aside from your current one?
2. What is, in your mind, the best invention?
3. If you could have dinner with one person, dead or alive, who would it be?

OK, I can't stand it anymore. I was invited to Blog It Forward by the wonderful, esteemed SCN Community Advocate, Marilyn Pratt (whom I am honored to call my friend) a few weeks ago already. Ever since that moment, my goal was to catch up on all of the previous Blog It Forward posts and then write mine.

Well, that's turning out to be nearly impossible given the number of (waking) hours in the day (kudos to your brilliant initiative, Moshe Naveh)! I've been reading every chance I get, but I feel like Mickey Mouse in Disney's version of the Sorcerer's Apprentice, with the brooms that just keep multiplying and multiplying and fetching water, and Mickey almost drowns... (start at min 5:00 in the video to see the part I'm talking about)

So while I'm only up to Blag (Alvaro Tejada Galindo)'s post in the Blog It Forward Chain so far, I cry "uncle"! (that is, I'm going to give up my goal of reading all the posted ones first and go ahead and write mine).

Introduction to Me

Where does one start this? I guess with who I am and what I currently do. My name is Audrey Stevenson (geb. Weinland), and I am  a Senior Editor and Content Strategist on the SCN Team. I work (ostensibly) out of the Palo Alto office, but since I live almost two hours north in the town of Sebastopol (a nuclear-free zone!), I work mostly from home and drive in about once a week. I moved up here to the Sonoma County wine country about four years ago to be with my husband, and we absolutely love it here. I'm grateful every day that I work for a company (and team) that allows us to work in such a distributed fashion.

So here at SAP, I'm responsible (jointly with Talila Baron) for editing the SCN main homepage (also known now as the Welcome page). I also handle the Business Process News @SCN newsletter, and together with Brian Bernard and Jodi Fleischman, I'm responsible for the space overview page guidelines for the SCN site.

But this is just my latest incarnation at SAP. To reach the first time I joined SAP (yes, there have been several), you'll have to step into the time machine and travel back with me to 1990, when I started as a documentation developer in the office "trailers" at Max-Planck-Strasse 8 in Walldorf. Keith Elliott hired me back then to write user (oops, I mean project team) documentation for the Logistics module in MM. (Oh yeah, I guess I forgot to mention that I speak fluent German. I grew up bilingual--German mother, American father--and went to a German school in Washington, DC.  all the way through 13th grade. Yep, I got my Abitur!)

After a year and a half working in Walldorf, I left SAP as a full-time employee to move to the Pacific sun and sand--to the island of Guam, and then four years later to the island of Palau in Micronesia (any fellow SCUBA divers on SCN?), where I stayed until 2000, when I moved back to the U.S. (Guam, BTW, is in Typhoon Alley--I spent a night huddled in the bathroom, the safest part of the house because it was concrete, as the eye wall of Super Typhoon Yuri passed over our house.)

During the eight years I spent in the islands, I was privileged to work for SAP as a consultant, on a project basis, flying to Walldorf to work on the information design of the documentation that's now in the Help Portal, and spending time at the old Waltham office near Boston working on other editing projects. And when I was not "off-island" on assignments, I worked on book translations. If you ever read The SAP R/3 System: A Client/Server Technology, by Ruediger Buck-Emden, or ABAP/4: Programming the SAP R/3 System, by Bernd Matze, in English, you were already reading my words back then!

In fact, SAP is the reason I enjoy a certain level of infamy on Palau. Internet connectivity was kind of new in the islands, and the technical staff at the first ISP was apparently not very well versed in the latest security protections. I managed to unwittingly cause a denial-of-service attack by having my personal email address forwarding to my SAP email address and (without thinking about it) setting an automatic out-of-office reply on my SAP email address during a long weekend!

Fun Fact(s)

Looks like I already started this section, so I may as well continue!

10 years ago, I started riding motorcycles. I started on a BMW F650, and I eventually graduated to my current bike, another Beemer: an R1150RT. Here's a photo of me on my bike.

Can I just say that learning to ride a motorcycle was one of the best things  I ever did in my life? I could go on and on about all of the positive things about riding and motorcyclists, the amazing connections and life-long friends I've made in that community, and "it's about the journey, not about the destination."

But then I'd miss sharing the funnest fact of all: I met my now-husband on a Singles Motorcycle Club ride six years ago, and two years later we were married in Vegas (the weekend right before TechEd 2008!), on a motorcycle, at a drive-up window. This is not a joke--I have photos to prove it! (that's me on the back, with my veil strapped to my helmet with duct tape)

Eloping and having a fun wedding was the best decision we could have made. The memories are priceless!

OK, enough fun stuff. Back to Business.

What Do You Enjoy Most in Your Work and Why?

This one is so easy I probably shouldn't share it, because then everyone will want my job! What makes my job fun is preparing the SCN homepage for an update of the rotating features at the top of the page.

It means I get to read through many, many blog posts and comments, see what SCNers are talking about, and keep my finger on the pulse of the community. I have to (get to?) find the latest and greatest from the usual suspects (read: SAP Mentors), but I also get to dig out those hidden gems, the folks who have perhaps written their very first blog post and done an impressive job. I get to highlight them on the homepage so the whole community can benefit from their new insights and perspective.

And the very best part of the job is the reaction of some of these community newbies when I let them know their content is being highlighted on the homepage. There is no better reward than when a member replies "this has motivated me to write more in the community!"

What Was the Most Fun Project You Ever Participated in and Why?

I will start with a project from the personal side, while I try to think about my most fun work-related project. Three years ago, I decided I wanted to raise chickens. We live in a rural area, on 2 acres of land, so we have the space to do it.

My husband suggested we buy a coop, but I said "Noooooooo, we're gonna make one, silly!"    What followed was a two-year project, in fits and starts, to research coops, research what chickens (my users) needed in a coop, drawing up plans, seeing more coops and deciding we needed more features (don't we need an egg-retrieval door?), collecting materials (we reused wood from an old dog house we had torn down), and finally, finally, actually building the thing.

Here's a photo of the final product. Not too shabby, eh?

Now that we had the hardware in place (the coop), we needed the software (the chickens). In March this year, I bought day-old chicks at the local feed store, and brought them home, where they spent the first 8 weeks living in a nice, warm brooder box. When they were 9 weeks old, we moved them out into the coop, and they've been thriving ever since. We have a total of six hens now, and we currently get 5-6 eggs a day. I've posted a few videos along the journey that you can find on YouTube.

It's nice to know your breakfast scramble was donated by happy chickens!

As for the most fun I had on a work project for SCN, that would be when we first started to develop the Business Process Expert community, aka BPX Community. I got to meet lots of new (to me) folks at SAP (like Helen Sunderland) and collaborate with them and with Marilyn (and a host of other SCN team members) to structure the new community, seed it with content, and get it going. It was really our baby, and we nurtured it and grew it to early teenager-hood, if you will. (ouch... not sure I like that metaphor and all it conjures up, with pimples and such...)

Although the BPX Community itself was folded into SCN when we moved to the Jive platform (just as SDN was), you can see the main topics started there continuing in spaces like the Business Process Management and Composition space and the industry spaces, like SAP for Retail. Promoting BPX was how I first met Natascha Thomson.

And now for Marilyn's specific question...

Describe an Instance when Empathy in a Project, Development, Collaboration, Work Experience, or Community Interaction Turned a Situation Around (or Should Have)

I thought about this one quite a bit (this was another reason it took me so long to post this blog). I considered various stories, including one that came to mind when I was reading Jelena Perfiljeva's BIF post. I was going to write about how I and the rest of the SCN worker bees were definitely the recipients of empathy from the normally most vocal members of the community when we launched with our less-than-perfect SCN beta site. Many of them knew what it was like to be on a project that large under that much time pressure. Many waited a long time before they really said much publicly, and several of them reached out in the back channels to let us know they understood what it was like to be in our shoes.

But then I thought some more about it, and I thought about Marilyn herself, about WWMD (what would Marilyn Pratt do), and also about what she does NOT always do. And I realized that often, women in technology -- or heck, women in business, or anyone from other diverse groups trying to make their way in the mainstream business world -- forget to empathize with themselves. No, I'm not saying feel sorry for themselves. Empathizing is definitely NOT the same as feeling sorry for someone.

No, it just means being kind to ourselves, forgiving ourselves, or smiling (that one's for you Moya Watson) in the mirror, in order to help turn a situation around. Remembering the good in ourselves can help us see the good in others.

Pass It On

Now I'd like to blog it forward to a couple of folks:

Natascha Thomson: I asked you first! (I just wasn't able to blog it forward to you in public before others did...  ;-)  Natascha has started her own social media business MarketingXLerator, and I know she's trying hard to stay connected to the community, as she made many connections and friends in her time at SAP (myself included)

Heike van Geel: I was in a Design Thinking workshop earlier this year with Heike, and she struck me as someone with great insight. Would love to see her post in the chain.

Christian Happel and Christian Horak: They caught my attention recently when they showed true community spirit by dealing with a difficult-to-swallow blog post in a very calm, approachable manner, i.e. with empathy for the blogger's frustrations. I think the community should learn more about them. I know I would like to!

As for the questions I'd like them to answer:

Pick two questions from Marilyn's post or Moshe's post, and select one from anyone else's post, or make up your own!

Conclusion

After reading all that I've put down here, you'd think I was a writer, not an editor, and a writer who definitely NEEDS an editor! "Write short for the Web" and all that... Oh well... hope at least a few folks make it this far!