Published August 12, 2016 by Bill Carmody, INC.

First of all, wow. As a 22 year digital marketing veteran, I’m in awe of Drew Neisser, founder and CEO of Renegade. He spent the last 5 years of his life interviewing 64 of the brightest brains in marketing today and published my new favorite book on marketing, The CMO’s Periodic Table: A Renegade’s Guide to Marketing. I’m in awe for several reasons. First, because he was able to wrangle each thought leader’s secret sauce from them. Second, because he was able to compile all these brilliant ideas into 7 pillars and formed a tight “periodic table” of marketing. Third, there is zero fluff in this book. And perhaps the best part is that you don’t have to read any of it sequentially. You can grab what you need and keep the book on your desk as a reference guide. Jonathan Becher, SAP’s Chief Digital Officer, is quoted within.

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“Lucky for me, I run marketing for a company that specialized in using technology to solve complex business challenges,” says Jonathan Becher (SAP). “For example, I have a mobile dashboard where my leadership team and I have real-time visibility into all parts of our marketing business. We can see what’s working and what isn’t, then redeploy resources and budget as necessary.”

Click here to read the full article.

Published July 28, 2016 by Don Bulmer, Gartner

Executives responsible for leading digital transformation face daunting challenges.  This is especially true in complex business organizations with entrenched cultures and longstanding business models that resist transformation. I recently sat down with Jonathan Becher, SAP’s Chief Digital Officer (CDO). Jonathan is a longtime advocate and practitioner of innovation, digital excellence and customer-driven marketing.

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“Like most companies, digital became a hot word at SAP.  Changing the user experience gets the most buzz and attention in many digital initiatives.  Success, however, requires that you do more than create a new front-end design or user experience.  You also need to address fundamental issues and adapt core business process, in order for digital to deliver innovation that creates value.  Innovation through digital happens when you change the business model as well as the customer experience…”

Click here to read the full blog.

Digital Interview Broadcast July 27, 2016 by Rick Horrow, Comcast Sports Network

Rick Harrow of Comcast Sports Network interviewed Jonathan Becher, SAP’s chief digital officer, for his Beyond the Scoreboard program. They discussed SAP’s role in business, sports and beyond, including digital transformation, the CDO role, SAP Store, SAP’s sports portfolio and more.

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Click here to view the interview.

Published June 8, 2016 by Bryan Kramer of PureMatter (video interview)

This special episode of the Substance series is a follow-up with Jonathan Becher, Chief Digital Officer at SAP, where we discuss what it means to create digital shifts today. The original in-depth and personal interview in 2014 revealed how Jonathan (at the time the Global CMO at SAP) defined “Social Business” and how it enabled him to profitably manage marketing within a massive 77,000 employee, 20 billion dollar organization.

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Now 2.5 years later, he has transformed his role at SAP to focus on building end-to-end digital business units within SAP as the CDO. Through this transition to digitizing a business model, Jonathan has become a true cultural change agent within SAP. Over the course of the past 16 months, he and his team have identified six key mindset issues that get in the way of a business becoming more digitally affluent; some of which he shares with me during our talk. He has also gained a revolutionary perspective on the widely recognized focus on customer experience by taking it to the next level: complete business model transformation.

Click here to view the interview.

Published June 2, 2016, by Laurie McCabe of SMB Group, IT-Director

“Digital transformation” is one of the top trending buzzwords in technology today. But what does digital transformation mean? In broad terms, many define it as using digital technology to enable innovation and new, often disruptive, business models. However, technology vendors put different spins on digital transformation, depending on how their solutions fit in to the puzzle. So I was interested to hear how SAP is framing the digital transformation story for its SAP Business One partners at SAP’s Business One Americas Innovation Summit in April. Although the ERP giant is best know for its large enterprise solutions, Business One, with over 50,000 customers worldwide, is SAP’s flagship business management solution for SMBs.

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In his opening keynote, Jonathan Becher, Chief Digital Officer at SAP, addressed the growing reality that today, companies need to disrupt or be disrupted. Unlike the industrial revolution, which allowed for a more linear approach to change, the digital era requires exponential change.

To read the full article, click here.

Published May 27, 2016 by Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany)

SAP wants to help other companies cope with digitization. ‘But is SAP prepared itself?’ asks German newspaper ‘Süddeutsche Zeitung’.

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The most difficult challenge in adapting to the requirements of the presence is the corporate culture, says Jonathan Becher, Chief Digital Officer at SAP. Thus, 20 to 30 smaller projects per year are executed annually, “which is better than three or four large ones,” Becher explains. If one of them is successful, they’re implemented on a larger scale. An example: Until recently, one could only buy SAP software via consultants. Becher has established an online shop for the first time in the company’s history. By now, one can purchase SAP software in 195 countries online via credit card. It’s easy and simple. “All the great chess moves have been made,” says CEO Bill McDermott facing the future. “Now it’s about many small steps.”

Original in German, not available online.

Published May 26, 2016 by Thomas Wailgum, ASUG News

SAP has taken the plunge into the data-as-a-service arena, announcing its first-ever data product that offers location-based consumer information aggregated from the networks of U.S. mobile carriers. The product is called SAP Digital Consumer Insight.

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According to Jonathan Becher, chief digital officer at SAP, this is the long-standing question SAP is trying to solve for potential buyers of the data: Why can’t we digitize the physical world in the same way we’ve been able to generate so much insight from the online world?

Click here to read the full article.

Published May 25, 2016 by Michael Kroker, WirtschaftsWoche (Germany)

During SAPPHIRE NOW 2016 in Orlando, Florida last week, SAP CEO Bill McDermott presented a plan for the company’s envisaged journey over the next few years. McDermott wants to add more digital goods such as marketing or payment data to the company’s offerings. Customers will be able to download data easily via SAP’s own app store, like the new SAP Digital Consumer Insight announced at the show.

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“Consumer Insight is only a first step,” says Jonathan Becher. “We will expand our digital offerings significantly in the coming months.” Like his boss McDermott, Becher thinks big. The new offerings are to go far beyond mere data subscriptions. He can imagine, for example, that company HR departments might download information about applicants from the SAP Store. He also sees facts and figures on customer payment behavior as a potential future business field for new data services.”

Click here to read the full article (original in German).

Published May 24, 2016 by Jim O’Donnell, TechTarget

Do you know who your customers are? Do you know what they looked at before they bought an item? Do you know what they were doing before they entered your store? Answering these questions and more has been easy for online businesses, who can track a user’s every click. But for traditional brick-and-mortar businesses, not so much. Perhaps until now, however, with the release of SAP Digital Consumer Insight, a data-as-a-service product that promises to give physical businesses access to the kind of data that can help them better understand their customers and markets.

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“This offering does to retail stores what Web marketing has done for websites,” Jonathan Becher, SAP chief digital officer said. “On a website it’s important to know how long someone stays on your site before they leave, but if you’re a retailer you don’t know how long they stay in your store before they leave. For a website it’s important to understand the path to purchase, how many items did they look at before buying, but you don’t have a way to know that in a physical store. What we’ve done for the first time is to take all this information that people have figured out in the digital world, and make it available to the physical world.”

Click here to read the full article.

Published May 24, 2016 by TechTarget

Two digital officers weigh in on why the term “failing fast” doesn’t work for their organizations. The problem: failing fast may work for Silicon Valley startups, but for organizations such as SAP SE and the city government of Boston, the term doesn’t instill much confidence.

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“Running around saying ‘fail fast‘ is a little like having an extra head on my body,” Jonathan Becher, chief digital officer at SAP, said during the recent CDO Summit in New York. “Instead of running 10 big bets a year, let’s figure out how we can run hundreds of little bets a week.” Experimentation is a term rooted in science, which is more palatable to Becher and Lockwood’s respective communities, and yet it gets at the same iteration loop as failing fast — namely test, gather results, measure, repeat.

Click here to read the full article.