If I were to ask a roomfull of experienced SAP consultants a particular question it’s near certain all hands will go up. The question has to do with the first response of a series we as consultants receive sooner or later upon submitting an inquiry on the powerful SAP online support system (OSS). This response is a good first response for a system like the OSS. It’s the equivalent of checking that an electric device machine is plugged into an outlet before starting to troubleshoot the machine itself.
The first response would be to read the relevant documentation or to check a few basic settings. It’s typically proferred by what I like to refer to as the first line of defense, i.e. a less experienced OSS services agent.
Most of the consultants in that room would put up their hands that they’ve been on the receiving end of one of these basically unhelpful, but understandably necessary responses.
Most of those consultants will also tell you that unfortunately for the helpful folks servicing the OSS it can be a very frustrating reply. Frustrating because we would have already looked at the basic solutions and a number of other solutions besides. We know the manuals backwards and forwards. We feel like time is being wasted.
A consulting colleague recently confessed that he’d submitted his first OSS question after nearly 10 years in the business – a matter of pride he said. I daresay most of the rest of us seek help a little quicker, but even so we don’t OSS something until we’ve explored every avenue. We don’t want to be embarrassed on the OSS. Those messages will be there for anyone to see long after we’re gone.
I’ve thought for a while now that if only we had some sort of experience rating for OSS users then we could get past this problem. If you’re an experienced HCM time management consultant, say, then you won’t get the ‘read the documentation’ response for your questions. Instead, you’d immediately be patched through to an experienced OSS services consultant or a developer ready to tackle the question you’ve described in detail with examples and possible solutions. The trick is of course that we don’t have a universal OSS user rating system.
But we do have a rating system of sorts on the SDN.
So, wouldn’t it be grand if a person’s points on the SDN counted towards the level of OSS support experience they get on their first response? This would be a case of one community ‘rating’ finding currency in another, related community. Call it cross-community value translation. It’s on the level of a person’s eBay seller reviews counting for something if that person started selling on Amazon.
One can unravel this one quite a bit more. I’ll leave that for someone else or for later.
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