SAP Urges Congress to Adopt Innovation!

SAP Urges Congress to Adopt Innovation!

TAKE NOTE(Insights into the SAP solution and technology) 

SAP Public Services Urges Congress to Adopt Innovative Solutions to Address the Nation’s Biggest IT Challenges, Save Taxpayer Dollars

WASHINGTON, DC  — Jennifer Morgan, president of SAP Public Services, Inc., a subsidiary of SAP AG, testified on May 24th before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information, Federal Services, and International Security. Morgan was invited to address members of Congress in a hearing titled “Innovating with Less: Examining Efforts to Reform Information Technology Spending.” The hearing explored efforts by President Obama to cut wasteful and inefficient IT spending within the federal government.

Citing advances in in-memory computing, cloud computing and mobile solutions, Morgan said: “The advances in technology over the last few years now allow government to tackle some of the largest challenges with fewer resources and shortened deployment times. A host of new technologies, specifically ones that turn large amounts of data into useful and actionable information, are transforming the way the private sector does business. Using the same technology, the government has the ability, for example, to proactively identify possible improper payments which could literally save billions of taxpayer dollars.”

A very large and growing portion of SAP’s business occurs in collaboration with its partners and, most importantly, with its customers. New solutions have to work seamlessly with legacy solutions. Vendor lock-in is “out;” co-innovation and teamwork is “in.”

“We found that the fastest and most successful results occur when industry and government co-innovate to bring new possibilities to life through technology,” Morgan said.

Some of these solutions are already at work for the American people and delivering results. “In just 22 days, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board made history by moving the tremendous amount of stimulus grant data housed on Recovery.gov to a public cloud environment,” Morgan said. Today, citizens can track spending of stimulus funds through their Recovery Explorer platform.

“More recently, the Recovery Board created FAST ALERT enabling federal agency personnel from across the government to perform large and concurrent searches though big data sets to identify potentially fraudulent entities and individuals,” Morgan added.

In the hearing, Morgan said one of the biggest challenges facing the government are IT procurement processes, which can often take longer than the modernizations themselves, “This becomes a challenge when technology innovation cycles are getting shorter and shorter, costs are going down and benefits can be achieved sometimes quicker than the acquisition process itself.”

UNDER DEVELOPMENT(Information for ABAP Developers)

In this months blog I will continue to take a look at the SAP Controls Technology and how we can use it in our development.

There is constant communication passed between controls on the SAP GUI and the application that resides on the application server. The SAP Controls Technology Framework and the Automation Controller are the vehicles by which these communications take place

Read More

Q&A(Your Questions answered)

Q. Months after my company has upgraded from 4.6c to ECC6.0, our team of programmers are still coding in the traditional 4.7c way. I’m eager to try out the new OO approach of ABAP, but much to my dismay most people here only emphasize on getting things done in the shortest time frame given.

My question would be:
1) When do people in your organization actually started coding in OO ABAP?
2) Is there any significant reason that people would want to code it in an OO way?

A. Let me answer this as you asked, in 2 parts…

Part 1 –

Most developers in my organization have learned classic ABAP before being introduced to  ABAP OO. They are mostly senior developers who, until recently, restrained from learning proper OOP and OOD principles. I am happy to report they are now using a good mix of ABAP OO while still using some procedural ABAP features. Furthermore, we work in a legacy environment. The basics of our backend was built during the times of 4.6C. It is hard to bring proper OO Design into legacy systems, but we are trying!

On the other hand, the procedural features still work. Some features like transactional database updates are mostly used from the procedural part of ABAP. You might know Update Function Modules or Subroutines exclusively for database transactions (those you can call IN UPDATE TASK). They are an integral part of the ABAP basic components. One can’t deny that the procedural ABAP part is still needed.

There are convincing reasons to move to the OO way of doing things. They are mostly not about performance but about better decoupling of components in your system making it far more maintainable.

But in my experience it’s hard to convince people to move out of their comfort zone using reasonable arguments. It usually works better to show them the way. Slowly start using OO constructs in your own code, show people how clean it looks. This is not something you will achieve in months, it can take time to get people to think and work differently. Strong Leadership who value and understand Part 2 below are instrumental in shifting the paradigm.

Part 2 –

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