SAP Role Separation

Yes, yes, I know I should be talking about SAP, being an SAP blog an all, but I just can't resist to tell you about the recent movie that I went to: Harry Porter and the Goblet of Fire. All I can say is, "Wow!". This is more like it. Much darker and more gloomy in nature. My kind of movie. Feels like the "doom" you feel in the "Lord of the Rings". To all, yes, I do recommend watching this movie. I'll give it 4 out of 5 stars.

Now back to our usual program.

One thing I realize about SAP, is that the way they structure things, there's a clearly separation between technical roles, and the so-called "functional roles". Functional roles is divided into the respective modules. A typical functional roles looks something like the following:

• SD/MM Consultant
• FI/CO Consultant
• PM/PS Consultant
• HR Consultant

etc etc. Basically, functional people are the "domain expert" of the module. They are the ones who'll be facing directly with the users, gathering requirements, and configuring the modules to suite the clients business process.

The technical roles is the supporting the roles. They're the ones who will customize, fine-tune, install, etc etc to support the functional team. A typical technical team looks like this:

• BASIS consultant
• ABAPers
• BW consultant

Clear separation between these roles means greater benefit attain from specialization. But the drawbacks: it's harder to find someone who can look at the "bigger picture", the overall perspective of the SAP system.

In other words, no one person can claim that they know everything there's is to know about SAP. To claim such a thing would be an outright blatant lie!