Published March 21, 2016 by Bruce Rogers, Forbes

As the Chief Digital Officer of SAP, Jonathan Becher is tasked with building a new business unit with SAP that will help people discover, try, buy, and use SAP offerings in a simple, entirely digital interaction. Previously, he was SAP’s chief marketing officer (CMO). He joined SAP from its acquisition of  Pilot Software where he was President and CEO. In this article, Bruce Rogers recounts his conversation with Jonathan on the emerging role of the Chief Digital Officer.

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Bruce Rogers:  It’s been a little over a year since you moved from the CMO role at SAP to a newly created position as Chief Digital Officer.  Tell us about your role.

Jonathan Becher:  I have what I describe as a T-shaped role inside the organization, and you’ll remember lots of people have talked about T-shaped roles in the past, McKinsey is always big on that as a background model, but the downward spike, the vertical bar of the T is designed to build a new business unit whose mission statement is to allow anybody in the world to be able to buy and to use an SAP offering, and maybe eventually a third-party offering, with little to no human interaction.

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Published March 17, 2016 by Den Howlett, Diginomica

The notion of disruption is nothing new in management and technology circles. Most recently, it has taken on special meaning in a number of markets as new entrants seemingly emerge from nowhere creating havoc for incumbents. The obvious example is Uber but there are many others. In technology, the idea of ditching data centers and running enterprise solutions as services can be regarded in the same manner, in large part because SaaS removes the need for costly IT infrastructure and the supporting mechanisms. Yet if recent surveys are to be believed, we are still at the early innings of seeing a transformation over to SaaS, despite being 10 years or more into this movement.

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As noted by Dennis in the article: Over at SAP, Jonathan Becher, who leads the company’s digital solutions unit, recently told me how his unit is succeeding in selling on an inbound basis only. No sales rep calls. It’s small scale right now so the impact is minimal but I wonder what happens if Becher’s unit achieves breakout enterprise level scale?

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Podcast Replay Published March 16, 2016 by CeBIT Staff

Jonathan delivered a keynote presentation at CeBIT 2016 in Hannover, Germany, on March 16 titled “Digital Transformation: Disrupt or Be Disrupted.” Following the presentation, he was interviewed via podcast by the CeBIT staff.

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“Self-disrupt your business before others will do it for you,” is Jonathan Becher’s appeal to every company. The world is changing so fast that they have to start to change today. Important is that people are encouraged to do small steps. There shouldn’t be preached a failure culture, but there has to be a motivation for employees to start experiments.

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Published February 15, 2016 by Brand Quarterly

Believing those individuals who go above and beyond for their brand deserve more credit, we called on our readers to let us know who they see as true Brand Champions – within their company or the marketplace at large.  Our readers have spoken, and from their nominations, we have selected a group of 40 outstanding individuals that epitomise the spirit of a true Brand Champion. They proudly represent their brand at every given opportunity – at events, through their social media networks and, of course, in their day-to-day contact with customers, suppliers and colleagues.

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In celebrating these evangelists, innovators and visionaries… we are pleased to present Brand Quarterly’s 2016 Brand Champions. The list includes SAP CDO Jonathan Becher.

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Published January 2016 by Digital Business (SAP)

Digital transformation is a term that has clearly taken its place in the current business lexicon. But what does it really mean? Does it represent the latest zeitgeist or a true opportunity? Is it nothing more than a way for consultants and vendors to sell more of their wares?

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In this article, Jonathan Becher, chief digital officer for SAP SE, shares the three critical elements for a successful digital transformation. “Like many catchphrases, digital transformation can mean many things to many people. So what makes for a true digital transformation? I believe every successful digital transformation has the following three elements: a new customer experience, a new business model, and a new value-creation model.”

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Published January 6, 2015 by Maptive

We are at the beginning of a revolution that will impact every business and life on this planet. While we live in the information age, it is vital to have a way to process all the information into something tangible and usable. Thankfully, this is where big data comes into play. Who is the best source of information on big data?

With over 1.2 billion websites, it’s a challenge to find the best people to follow, and get quality advice from. So we [Maptive] took the time to find some of the most influential experts in the field of data for you. To find out who the most influential big data experts are around the world, we compared many data science practitioners’ impact on social media. Although by no means a perfect science, social media has given us an inside peek into how influential people are online.

Without further ado, after analyzing over 800 names, here is … a data-backed approach of the top 100 Big Data experts to follow.

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The list includes Jonathan Becher: Once the CMO at SAP and former three time CEO, Jonathan has since become the Chief Digital Officer at SAP, where he heads up a newly-created integrated business unit which will market and sell traditional ecommerce and digitally native software, content, education and services direct to the consumer through SAP’s digital store. Jonathan also blogs at jonathanbecher.com.

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