You do not understand me

Lawyers and doctors are good examples of "positive" secret languages. Specialized vocabulary and sentence formulations give these professions the opportunity to discuss among themselves in a precise, efficient, and hopefully error-free manner.

A technical vocabulary and specific abbreviations such as acronyms are familiar to most stakeholders. Every member of the SAP community knows and uses specific terms that are hardly known outside or have a completely different meaning: from SolMan to loom (NetWeaver).

The SAP user association DSAG has now determined that existing customers apparently no longer understand the ERP world market leader SAP: Terms such as Leonardo, Cloud Platform and others can neither be located nor evaluated by existing customers.

Has the SAP community reached the limit of its secret language? Is SAP's vocabulary different from that of the users? Can even the DSAG association no longer act as an interpreter here?

Already the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 to 1951) said:

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

Has SAP reached the limits in terms of market growth and innovation? SAP has at least come up against closed doors with existing customers. If the DSAG survey is to be believed, Leonardo, IoT, machine learning, cloud platform and blockchain are not door openers.

The disaster is interpreted to mean that SAP has not succeeded in adequately communicating its own ideas of innovation and roadmaps in language over the past 18 months. Clearly, SAP's marketing and communications departments have reached their limits and failed.

The interpretation of the DSAG study can really only lead to one conclusion: SAP's existing customers no longer understand their in-house supplier. SAP communicates in a language and with a vocabulary that is unfamiliar to the SAP community.

SAP's keynotes talk about visions, products, services and roadmaps that existing customers obviously neither need nor understand. In the past, the user association DSAG was always a helpful translator and mediator - now this bridge also seems to be breaking down. There is no longer any communication between SAP and its customers.

"You don't understand me" therefore applies in both directions! SAP does not understand its customers, and vice versa - which ultimately means that we are coming up against a fundamental limit here, or in terms of road traffic: a double barrier line. Nothing gets through there!

SAP organizes a Leonardo congress in Frankfurt/M. and none of the existing customers come because nobody in the community understands it. Naturally, this IoT-, AI- etc. Congress was attended by almost 2000 people - only they were the wrong ones!

The teaching and educational mission of SAP's Leonardo Congress went nowhere, did not reach the existing customers who still do not know what Leonardo, Cloud Platform etc. are good and useful for.

Perhaps in the future the user association will be able to build voice channels and communication bridges again, but until then, existing customers and SAP will be shouting to each other from the opposite shore: "You don't understand me!"