How did we get here is something which is as much about organizational structure as it is about market scale. The fact is there are probably many reasons as to how we got to such a place, I focus on one of these below.
It has already been stated as to how our acquisition strategy was poorly handled and this was for sure a contributing factor. . At the same time, I know there were employees in the acquisition who have helped contribute to the success of SAP., but it cannot be ignored that we did nothing to harmonize or consolidate the SAP workforce and the acquisitions workforce . For example after at some 10 years or more after acquiring these companies, it is insane that these acquisitions still maintain their original offices which only perpetuates the duplication, cost and culture separation.
However, I believe issues such as the foregoing are due to a much more consequential organizational issue than just bad acquisition integration.. Let's get past CK and the Executive Board, it has already has been well stated that they are inept in their roles and let's look deeper in our company at where other issues may be..
The fact is most global companies are really run on a "regional basis" - this is where most employees are impacted and relevant decisions affecting them are made and this is also where SAP has been a complete and total failure. Take any one of the Regions, LATAM, APJ, NA, etc... and look at the individuals who are holding the title of "President" of these Regions. These individuals perform nothing more than a Sales role and use the title to impress potential customers so as to hopefully close the deal. Not a single one of these individuals has any experience in running anything much less a corporation having 20K, 25K or more employees. Even more ludicrous is that SAP has structured these regions so that certain organizations housed in such a region don't even report to the President - the Labs and Marketing organizations are a good examples of this. We have concocted a bizzare structure where there is no single point of responsibility for a given region. This then allows for a very expensive free for all where no body is really in charge of anything holistically . Policies vary completely from one to the next organization in a given region.
This might have worked when SAP was still running like a "start up", but that ended al long time ago and so should have this ridiculous regional org structure. In addition to a President/CEO function, the day to day operations for a region should have been placed under the domain of an experienced COO capable of finding opportunities within all functions of SAP regionally and the acquisitions to harmonize jobs, processes and reduce internal costs. This is all missing from our structure.
So the way I see it is that we are here because SAP never had the proper organizational structure either at the corporate level and for sure at the regional level. It isn't possible for a company the size of SAP to dodge the workforce issues which now face us and as a result we have back to back layoffs of 12,000 people - all because we essentially had nothing more than sales personnel theoretically in charge of our regions. SAP failed to grow up and behave like a fortune 100 company - what successful company would do such a stupid thing? Remains to be seen if the incoming Chairman is either capable or interested in how to fix this and most likely may just go for outsourcing as a way to gain efficiencies.
It is a sad statement on a company widely recognized from our product portfolio as a market leader, bar none - It didn't have to be this way, if only SAP had the foresight to compartmentalize and limit the sales titles and the intelligence to get experienced business leaders capable of running all functions and aspects of a large scale organization and take full responsibility and accountability of our regional operations - and now some of us will have to pay the price for this mistake.