{"id":41,"date":"2005-05-21T09:06:45","date_gmt":"2005-05-21T15:06:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=41"},"modified":"2005-05-21T09:06:45","modified_gmt":"2005-05-21T15:06:45","slug":"the_thing_that","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=41","title":{"rendered":"The thing that goes on the hip"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tech people are always fretting about the wide divide between the \u201cIT side\u201d and the \u201cbusiness side.\u201d I\u2019m convinced that the gap is mainly a language gap \u2013 the business side simply can\u2019t figure out what the IT side is talking about. Even the leaders of the IT industry seem to take a perverse pride in never saying anything that a normal human being might understand. Take SAP. It didn\u2019t invite me to its big Sapphire pow-wow<\/a> in Boston last week, but I did go to the company\u2019s web site and download transcripts of Sapphire keynotes. They were all more or less impenetrable, but Shai Agassi\u2019s speech set a new standard for opacity that will give his counterparts something to shoot for. Here\u2019s an excerpt, in which Agassi introduces a new metaphor (the old one apparently involved a refrigerator) to explain what SAP\u2019s NetWeaver software does:<\/p>\n

\u201cLet’s look through this thing. Remember we had the fridge. We decided to retire the fridge. We’re going to talk about a new metaphor from now on. What is NetWeaver and how does the whole thing come together? We talk about what we call the body of information. If you think about how the body of information is constructed, there are multiple pieces in there. It’s the mirror, if you want, of what we had with the fridge. The only difference from the fridge is that all the pieces have to work together. The face is the portal. If you think about the brain behind the face, there are two halves. The analytics, the structured side; knowledge management, the unstructured side. The brain is critical not only for storing information but for processing. Anything that comes through the brain gets context. Through this brain, and what’s supporting it, is probably the backbone of your body of information: master data management. If you don’t have master data management, your body may be there, but it may not be able to move. And that’s very critical to understand. Every information that goes through, every transaction that goes through, at some point in time touches master data, and if you don’t have a coherent master data strategy and a coherent master data management server, you will not get an agile body. MDM is one of the biggest things that is happening right now in NetWeaver. Through the backbone, you get a lot of events. The events contextualize themselves through master data into the brain and then get back and thrown into the rest of your body. That network is like your nerve system.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow, why is it important that the nerve system, why is it important that XI actually is connected to BW and is connected to master data management? Think of what happens with your body. You pick up any element, and your body gets events from it, real-life events. You pick up a hot glass of tea, hot cup of tea. If it’s too hot, your first instinct, which happens at the node, is to let it go. Then it goes through your backbone into your brain, and the brain says, \u2018That’s Grandma’s china!\u2019 And what you do is, you go, \u2018Haaaah!\u2019 and you put it somewhere. That’s the brain. It all has to work together; you can’t just let it go. The pieces are not a piecemeal approach; it’s a body of information; it’s all powered by a single unified muscle system. Your application server. And it all comes together in NetWeaver. We’ve talked about this for the last two years. It really has to come together. Now the question is, what kind of body of information, what kind of power structure, what kind of infrastructure powers your house? And the other question is, not only are you agile, not only is it connected, but are you flexible? And do you have all elements? One of the things that we’ve seen now, the latest part, if you want, of the body, the new part, the new limb that somehow grew on all of us, is this thing that goes on the hip. When you get an event that comes into your new body part and you start using it, how scalable is it? Can you work with high bandwidth? Does it go right to your brain? Can you process it? Can you do this?\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure, but I think at the end he\u2019s talking about getting an erection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What divides the “IT side” from the “business side” is language, as a speech by a SAP executive once again makes clear.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}