The recent article Ringing Down The Curtain On Change Management Theater by Forrester analyst Charles Betz made me think about the future of SAP change management. What is it going to look like in 3, 5 or 7 years? One thing that is certain is that it won’t look the same as it does today. Over the years, I’ve seen SAP customers go from managing SAP change with spreadsheets, emails and ITSM tickets (and many still do it that way); to ITIL-based, semi-automated processes; and now towards business-driven automated Agile/DevOps practices. Companies are moving ahead with their own digital transformations, and their change management processes will also need to transform.
As Charles notes towards the end of his article, AI as could be a possible solution to help accelerate change management and automate some of the manual toil. I agree that AI can help, but I have a slightly different definition for the AI acronym.
Instead of Artificial Intelligence, I like to call it Automated Intelligence. Artificial Intelligence always seems to be “just around the corner”, while Automated Intelligence is here today. Automated Intelligence can help you change your mode of thinking from “who” approves a change, to “what” approves a change. Most SAP customers make tens of thousands approvals for SAP changes every year. Many of those approvals are done as a result of some other activity – a code inspection, a status change in the ITSM solution, a user acceptance or regression test. Automating 20% – 30% – 40% of those approvals through integration with a stable change management platform can greatly reduce the amount of people-based approvals and significantly speed up the SAP change process.
Rev-Trac customers are realizing the benefits of this type of Automated Intelligence today, and not having to wait for the other AI. If you want to discuss ways to intelligently automate your SAP change approval process, send us an email at sales@rev-trac.com.
