Strategic Enterprise Management (SEM): One experts opinion

Strategic Enterprise Management (SEM): One experts opinion

I'm an ABAP technical consultant with five years of experience working mostly with the FI/CO module. I would like to know whether SEM suits my profile and background. I would like shift my career into SEM. Can you please let me know is there are any technical requirements in this area?

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I think SEM is an interesting area. I was expecting it to take off more than it has. I assumed that managers would see a huge value in being able to easily slice and dice their SAP data and analyze trends.

It has been slower going on the SEM side than I thought. I'm not sure why that is. Part of it is may be that companies have found SEM to be a little complicated in scope and not as "built in" and intuitive as they would have wanted. Part of it may be the existence of other popular decision support applications.

At any rate, what we know for sure is that the demand for specialized SEM resources is not as strong as we thought it would be at this time. And I must say I have yet to see an ABAP-SEM type of job out there that would be the most natural fit for you. Having thrown a bit of cold water on SEM, I will say that it might be an attractive area for you to work into your ABAP-FI/CO skills without turning it into a sole focus. It's possible you could become a real expert on technical SEM issues but retain some broader capabilities programming within the core FI/CO module.

If you can pull that off, then you've combined the core focus with something more cutting edge, and this is the best way to go UNTIL the cutting edge area starts to really take off. Once it does, then it can become more of a primary focus for you.

This was first published in December 2006