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.”

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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.

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Published May 24, 2016 by David Carr, Forbes

SAP wants to be the first company you think of to help you run a simple, digital enterprise powered by live data and an elegant user interface. In other words, they would like you to think of them a little more like a German-engineered equivalent of Apple, with whom they announced a partnership earlier this month. I went to last week’s Sapphire Now user conference to catch up on how SAP is participating in the trend toward digital business.

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Chief Digital Officer Jonathan Becher, who used to hold the CMO job, said he sought a broader role for promoting digital trends “because I realized it doesn’t work if it’s only the marketing piece – it’s got to be end to end.” Now he has a dual role promoting more digital and agile ways of doing business within SAP, as well as promoting digital products.

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Published May 23, 2016 by ICT Business (Italy)

The German group, SAP, has unveiled Digital Consumer Insight, a new data-as-a-service solution, which will sell to companies, from 399 Euros, information on consumer packages in the real world obtained through mobile networks.

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Traceability will no longer be the prerogative of e-commerce. Privacy, according to the vendor, will be guaranteed the anonymity of the data collected.

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Published May 23, 2016 by CMSWire

Most of us know SAP as one of two things: the technology giant behind the revolutionary platform SAP HANA or the software engine that powers 76 percent of the world’s businesses. And while marketing fits into that mix, it’s not the first thing we think of … until now. Last week at SAPPHIRE NOW, the annual user conference SAP held here, there were three big announcements around marketing products.

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SAP officially entered the Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) business with a new product, SAP Digital Consumer Insight. It leverages data that interconnects traffic between the major mobile networks.

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Published May 23, 2016 by Jon Reed, Diginomica

It was a pivotal show for SAP, and a surprising one. Den’s got the review in SAPPHIRE Now 2016 – the verdict. One surprise – at least to some – was the ByDesign angle; Den wrote on that in SAP Business ByDesign – happy customers and significant progress.

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Another surprise was SAP’s digital consumer insight – a monster, Jonathan Becher’s stealth/skunkworks project now live on the SAP store (a product which impressed a lot of cynical bloggers).

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Published May 22, by CIO Today

Although numerous tools and services exist to track customer behavior online, the options have been more limited for tracking and analyzing customer behavior in the “real world” at brick-and-mortar stores and in other physical locations. SAP is aiming to change that with a new data service that enables enterprise clients to gain insights into the demographics of their customers, along with detailed descriptions of their real-world, offline behaviors. Called SAP Digital Consumer Insight, the new service is SAP’s first data offering. It was announced at the company’s recent SAPPHIRE NOW conference that ran May 17-19 in Orlando, Fla.

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Jonathan Becher, chief digital officer and head of SAP Digital, said that companies will be able to use the data provided by the service to glean insights that will help them improve their products and services, run better marketing campaigns, scout locations for expansion, and learn more about their competitors.

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Video interview of Jonathan Becher published May 20, 2016 by Diginomica

SAP has a mind-blowing analysis tool available on the digital store. This one really is a game-changer.

Click here to watch the interview conducted by Jon Reed, Diginomica, of Jonathan Becher disussing SAP’s new SAP Digital Consumer Insight data service.

Published by TechTarget, May 20, 2016

Digital leaders at CBS, IBM and SAP point to culture as one of the biggest digital transformation hurdles. Rather than resist cultural resistance to change, digital leaders at SAP, IBM and CBS encouraged executives at the recent Chief Digital Officer Summit in New York City to understand its root cause and get underneath it. Fair warning: Changing the corporate mindset or culture often takes time and creative thinking.

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For SAP’s Becher, cultural resistance eats up a good chunk of his time. “I’m certainly not a chief cultural officer, I don’t mean to suggest that,” Becher said, who became CDO in 2014 to lead the company’s new digital unit. “But I do think that 50% of my time is spent on deep mindset issues.” To overcome the change management hurdles, he and his team established “six characteristics of mindsets” required to facilitate change, Becher said.

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Published May 20, 2016 by Wirtschaftswoche (in Germany, not available online)

At SAPPHIRE NOW 2016, SAP CEO Bill McDermott announced to add digital goods such as marketing and payment data to SAP’s offerings and that customers will be able to download these via the SAP app store. According to McDermott, a turnover of USD 5 billion can be achieved with the new digital services within the foreseeable future.

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Jonathan Becher, Chief Digital Officer at SAP, said that Consumer Insights is just a first step. “We are going to considerably expand our digital offering in the coming months,” he stressed.