Ask-the-SAP-Expert: Vivien Boche

Ask-the-SAP-Expert – Vivien Boche

Eursap’s Ask-the-SAP-Expert article is a feature designed to give you up-to-date information on the latest SAP news, featuring key thought leaders in the SAP space, as well as regular interviews with the best SAP consultants in the business.

This month, we feature Vivien Boche, an SAP BTP evangelist. Vivien sits on the SAP Center of Excellence as BTP Senior Director and is a regular presenter at SAP events across the globe. She has a very active presence on social media platforms and is well loved for her short informative BTP videos in a TikTok format and her YouTube videos. Vivien is also the founding member of the Women Leaders Forum UK and has been described recently as a “corporate influencer”.

Vivien, so glad you can talk to us – maybe we can start with a little bit about who you are for readers unlucky enough not to know you!

I’ve been with SAP for almost six years now in various roles, starting in our Academy programme with the young talent, moving to being an innovation business designer, then in a solution advisor role and now in a BTP black belt team on a regional level. In all of these different roles it’s always exciting to learn something new and learn a different approach in each area while working with customers. It’s interesting as customers can often be very different, but there are some similarities. I’m always learning about their challenges and how can I help them. This is about listening and understanding them, and translating that into business value.

I’m passionate about uncovering what our customers need and showing them how technology can support to drive change and impact. To do this, it’s essential to be able to talk on different levels. Sometimes you need to talk at a high level, explaining the basic concepts and the business value drivers, and other times you need to be technical. A big part of this role is adjusting language depending on the target audience.

Now, I cover a wide region, from Finland to South Africa over to Dubai—this includes most of Europe, but not the German-speaking countries, which is funny because I am German! That is why I call myself the undercover German who works for a German company but has never worked in German for SAP.

And do you remember Vivien, where SAP first came onto your radar?

Well, as a German, I’ve known about SAP my whole life. And then I joined as part of the Next Generation programme that we have at SAP. The programme brings in young minds who think differently and includes partners from the likes of Accenture and Microsoft. SAP acts as the facilitator. As part of this, there was a challenge set. That was the first time I came to one of the SAP experience centres. They talked about how SAP are supporting tackling deforestation by using new technologies which can identify and analyse sounds to understand where chainsaws are operating. And I thought in that moment, “OK, that is pretty cool.”

Hearing about this new tech made me realise that SAP is not what I thought it was. And now, it’s incredible to see the kind of impact SAP is having on its customers. We are supporting the impact of global business processes. And I wasn’t aware of the scale of this before I tapped into that world. For everybody working in this area, you sometimes need to zoom out and get this perspective of what you are impacting. You might be working on this tiny part, but it all adds up to a global impact. And that’s what really fascinates me about the SAP world.

Let’s talk tech Vivien. Let’s be blunt: why should organisations running SAP be excited about BTP?

Wow, my favourite topic! BTP is incorporated into everything at SAP, and that is a good thing. But, it can also be a problem because sometimes people don’t know what to do with it. For example, customers have different processes and different business applications in the supply chain and the finance space etc. But sometimes these applications need to talk with one another, so they need to be connected, they need to be integrated. This is one key BTP area, because no process works well if it’s not integrated.

Sometimes customers have unique requirements and need tailored applications, something that is unique to their business process. In this case, customers might need to build an extension to their business processes with automation or an application. Again, this is where BTP can help.

Some customers are also not using SAP in the best way. They might also be using other business applications. But in all these applications, data is produced. How are you bringing all this data together? How do you harmonise all this data? How do you gain the right insights from this data? How do you visualise this data in a dashboard? Again, BTP can help customers to understand their data, it provides different dashboards that can predict what might happen in the future and help them plan what they need to develop in their organisation.

And one of the last use cases of course is AI. Remember, BTP is “Business Technology Platform”, so it is a technology foundation for organisations. What that means is that at SAP, we are offering customisable AI as well as embedding AI directly into applications. We are offering AI prebuilt into our applications such as SuccessFactors and Finance – often built on BTP. Even Joule itself is built on BTP.

So we’re drinking our own champagne, and we also offering this to our customers so that they can build their own customisable AI. By building their own AI models or consuming other large language model providers and building out their own AI use cases.

You have spoken a little about AI, and that’s the topic on everyone’s lips now. Do you think that BTP and AI are inextricably linked and that the future of BTP is AI and the future of AI in SAP is BTP? How closely related are the two?

They’re very closely related, but do not fully rely on each other. We are implementing AI across all the different SAP cloud applications that we’re offering.

But AI is not only in BTP. It’s across all the different cloud products that we offer. Most of the time we build this ourselves with BTP. But we are also giving users the choice to use the platform that we use to build out AI use cases. We must consider embedded AI and also customisable AI.

I wanted to talk a little bit about your travel. The reason I say that is because I’ve seen you at numerous conferences around Europe. So, you must travel a fair bit. What are the types of engagements you normally become involved in when you travel?

It’s a variety of different events from one-to-many or even one-to-one engagements.

If one to many, it’s typically conferences focusing solely on BTP or in a wider scope, showcasing how ERP technology is addressing today’s market. The subject is often about innovation, how to keep the core clean, extensibility, and how to also drive success out of BTP, and the values that can be gained from it.

I also advise customers on a one-to-one basis on how we can help them to address their business challenges. That’s what you’re not seeing on social media from me because I can’t share that I’ve just talked with this customer about XYZ because this is very sensitive information. These are not published so it’s always a bit of a fine line. I can only put half of my job on social media, partly because people would not enjoy it when I share how I look at Excel lists!

I’ve got to ask this question. When I see people at SAP conferences I always think, “What is it with the white trainers – the white sneakers – there?” Everybody at SAP seems to be wearing white sneakers now.

I’m not quite sure, maybe that is the new unwritten work uniform, part of the work life!

In one conference I remember you had some BTP branded ones!

We actually did make some BTP-branded ones for one event. And the most asked question in my inbox at the moment is how to get some! I still haven’t found the answer. But I’m trying my best.

And you have just become a founder member of the Women Leaders Forum UK? Can you tell us a little about that?

The forum itself is composed of various different female leaders in technology and other STEM related industries. The objective is to bring like-minded women from a similar position together so they can learn from each other, have a dedicated learning schedule, create a community, and join interactive coaching sessions.

All of this is to enhance the role of women in the workplace and create more role models in today’s work environment. And I’m lucky to be one of them. I often discuss personal branding, authentic communication and I lead coaching and input sessions on this. All in all, I’m very glad to be part of it.

There must have been some challenges to overcome, though. Being a successful woman in a broadly male dominated industry must have its challenges. Have you felt there have been obstacles in your path that have held you back? SAP is a progressive company to work for so that must help?

Yes, you’re right – the tech industry is still quite male-dominated, especially because I’m working in a technical environment, where BTP is the platform. So yes, there were challenge and obstacles. It can also be quite daunting sometimes. But, it is a great learning opportunity. It’s dependent on how you approach it and on your mindset.

It’s always great to have some kind of community of people around you who are like-minded and encourage you, from my personal network of my family and friends and my partner, but also to my colleagues and my mentors and coaches. It’s important also to have people who have your back and say, “go for it”, “you’re doing great”.

It’s also about having a positive mindset so that you don’t get down if something goes wrong. I always try to look ahead and see the positivity, which is sometimes hard to see, but is very important. I see this often with women only forums: you go to an event, and you see only women in the room. There is a lot of talk about different topics. We discuss things that happened at work or give each other advice about important topics, such as, how to stop people interrupting us.

These are tangible examples, but what often happens as part of these events is you get really energised, but then what happens after? It’s like you have this energy spike and then it fades away when you go back to your daily work. So, what I have started to do over the past few years is to talk more and more with my male colleagues about things that happened to me and other females to make them aware. For example, I would say, “OK, you know, this happened to me last week. How would have you reacted? Do you have any tips or advice?” And that often changes their perspective from someone who was not even aware of these things, and also creates an understanding that some actions can have an impact on women.

I feel like women can still learn a lot, but the men can learn too. So, it’s more about having a dialogue with one another. These types of forums are very good for empowerment, not feeling alone and gaining confidence, but I still would encourage everybody as one main tip, to start to align more with male allies in your organisation, whom you trust and who you feel can help with tips, but also to create awareness.

The first “advice” question for you – any advice for someone looking to build their personal brand as an SAP expert on social media platforms?

If you are serious about enhancing your social profile on a platform like LinkedIn, I would start with your profile. Nothing is more important than your profile and the good thing is there is not much competition. So, that gives you a huge advantage.

A good tagline, which is what is displayed under your name and then having a description about each of the jobs that you did is important, as well as adding your skills to each of the job descriptions. Then start to define the topics that you want to stand for. Is it in the BTP space? But what is it in the BTP space? Are you an extensibility expert? Are you a data analytics expert? To clearly define it, I would recommend less than three topics. For example, for me, it’s BTP and its value, but with a special focus on extensibility with clean core, automation and AI. And then I also do a lot around women in tech and career development. So, these are the three topics that I try to stand for.

Also, give a different perspective, a different approach. For example, if you’re writing three posts, why could you not combine these three posts and create an article? Try to leverage things that you have put out already and leverage them back into a different format. That can be powerful – just because you put it out on one channel doesn’t mean you cannot put it on another channel. For example, if you write a blog, could you also create a video out of it? You have the content already. Try to be smart about how you are linking things. It can be quite an advanced skill. And to be completely transparent, this is not easy.

Building a profile takes time – a lot of it. So, someone who is serious about it needs to want to invest the time. Being active on social media can feel a little like a pair of jeans: it does not fit everybody. If it feels wrong for you, that is OK. But I still encourage you to update your profile because that’s how you can put yourself forward as an expert in your professional area.

Okay Vivien – one last question, and it’s one we always ask our interviewees. What advice would you give SAP consultants in the market today – maybe they are ECC6 consultant looking to upskill in S/4HANA or new technologies in the SAP area?

If you’re an ECC6 consultant, I would look into the latest, cleaner ways of how to build extensibility options. There’s SAP Build, SAP Build code and now ABAP in the cloud as part of SAP BTP and in S/4 Hana Cloud. That is one area which I highly encourage everyone to investigate because more and more customers ask for this way to develop extensions. The classical way is also asked for, but it is worth looking to the future so that you understand all these areas more and what they entail.

Generally speaking, BTP is a useful topic to understand. We have a huge community out there. We have great blogs that explain a lot of things and there are also different courses and newsletters. There’s a lot that you can do to stay up-to-date.

The SAP Blogs and Communities are a good starting point, and there are a lot of learning journeys too. My personal bible (that’s what I call it) is the SAP Discovery Centre. It has so much BTP content. It focuses on different services explaining what it is, who’s using it, how to get started, what it costs and so on. Then it has reference architectures of how to build things, and finally it has different missions for getting hands-on. I use it every day and it has all the information I need, so it’s a great place to get started.

Also, it’s an exciting time for SAP consultants. Every time I speak about AI in a BTP context, two weeks later I need to look up what has happened and refresh my content. Staying ahead of the AI trend is one thing, but it’s challenging because there is always something new. Understanding how to use the different tools that we are making available on the market is a useful tip.

Vivien Boche talked to Jon Simmonds