Working from Home, 25 Years On

I recently celebrated my 25th year of working from home. The first ten were pre-Internet for me. I started out in Paris from where I directed projects around Europe, Japan, and Hong Kong, so there was a lot of travel involved. Since returning to America in 1991, I have continued to travel on a regular basis, so some of the “working from home” gets subtracted.


All the same, there’s a lot to celebrate when compared to a daily commute of one hour each way and the mixed blessing of seeing the same crew day after day.

I can be at my desk 60 seconds after waking and often am.
I can largely choose what hours I work.
I do not have to put up with co-workers slouching into my office to bitch about the boss or tell me about how they are paneling the basement or how about that Vikes game.
I have a kitchen fifty feet away.
The “men’s room” is fifteen feet away.
I have a window looking out on my Japanese garden.
No one listens in on my telephone conversations except my dog.
I am not called in to pointless meetings merely because of my proximity to the conference room.

I estimate that I have worked about 9 hours per day, 48 weeks per year = 240 days per year. That is exactly 6,000 work days. I estimate one in four was travel, leaving 4,500 days.

What I have saved:

Presuming two hours’ commute time and one hour of bullshit conversations per day:
4,500 days * 3 saved hours = 13,500 hours ~ 562 days to live the rest of my life.
Presuming an average of $8 per day of gas (not to mention all the car mileage), a direct savings of $36,000. Probably have saved on parking as well.
I cannot accurately gauge what I’ve saved on business clothing (suits, ties, shoes) but if we consider 1 $500 suit per year, that would make another $12,500. (I have yet to invest in a bathrobe with my company’s logo.)

There have been some additional costs such as having my own phone line for the fourteen years I’ve been an independent (~ $12K), as well as printers and office supplies (~$10K). Any other down side? Nope.

Better productivity, tangible savings of nearly $30,000, and a sense of liberty no office could ever provide.

Best. Career. Decision. Ever.

Center of Excellence Taking Center Stage. Systems Integrators Still Useless.

SAPPHIRE 2010, which took place a few weeks ago in Orlando, Florida, was my eleventh SAPPHIRE and seventh in Orlando. I have attended in the role of consultant, industry analyst, and just plain tourist. This year I left the analysis to my good friends and spent nearly all of my time with clients and prospects with a major focus on post-implementation strategies and, especially, Centers of Excellence.


For those who are unsure, I view a Center of Excellence as an enterprise organization with sufficient authorities, assets, and resources to drive continuous and measurable business improvement enabled by SAP applications software. It’s a subject I’ve been researching since 2001 with nearly all usable input coming from the clients.

Back in 2002, when I had written a white paper on the subject, I was rewarded with a spot on a keynote panel at SAPPHIRE. While 1,100 people attended, the main result was a shrug as in: “That’s great, Michael, but we’re still busy shaking out our implementations. See you in a few years.”

In the interim, I have carried on and finally, in October of last year, I had enough material (thanks as well to a number of contributors) to finally publish The SAP Green Book, Thrive After Go-Live, of which the centerpiece is a chapter “Building and Sustaining a Center of Excellence”.

Eight years after the 2002 SAPPHIRE keynote, I had the honor of presenting and panel-monitoring a day-long ASUG/SAP Kick-Off event led by Brian Dahill on the Center of Excellence and was very encouraged to find an outpouring of true interest (indeed, passion) coming from the attendees. Thanks to this event and the evangelism of Paul Kurchina of ASUG, there followed three more days of SAPPHIRE meetings that drove home the message: Center of Excellence is an emerging subject and demand for more information is quite high. Clients were avid to learn more about a) how to improve the end user experience and competency levels, b) how to bring business people into the equation, and c) what other firms have done in this regard.

I am now deep into conversation with half a dozen firms and their most pressing question is “Who can help us build a Center of Excellence?” The answer in this regard: it depends.

Clients reported claims by SAP, IBM, and Accenture to having a Center of Excellence offering but I found that while SAP Consulting and a newer SAP services arm known as Business Transformation Services can provide some guidance, they do not have a formal program for Center of Excellence building and little resource in this regard.

As for IBM and Accenture, an eight year old story continues. Back in 2002, I contacted the leaders of prominent SAP systems integrators to pose the question: Can you help clients build an SAP center of excellence?

Unsurprisingly, every one affirmed an ability to do so. Unconvinced, I invariably posed two “banana peel” questions: 1) can you show me your methodology and 2) can you show me some references?

Answer from all and sundry: um, no.

This scenario was repeated at least six times (Deloitte, Capgemini, et al) and just as many times my counterpart took what seemed like a logical next step: to introduce me to their head of applications outsourcing, which only inspired me to write an article entitled “Option A or Option A: Funneling Clients to Application Outsourcing.“ Clients who have recently turned to IBM and/or Accenture have reported that nothing has changed.

Normally, when client maturity (and demand) for a service reaches a high level, systems integrators see a market for their services and so step up. The fact of the matter is that firms like IBM and Accenture are seeking the “client capture” of application outsourcing and so are loathe to help clients build a self-sustaining organization. While their attitude in this regard is short-sighted in that most fully operational Centers of Excellence require a certain level of outsourcing, the fact remains that they will not help you, they will merely claim the ability to do so.

So we have come to a cross-roads in which client maturity in regard to Centers of Excellence is quite high while service provider maturity remains low. Clients are saying they are ready, that they understand the need and potential benefits of instituting and sustaining a vibrant Center of Excellence. If we cannot answer who can help them, the one answer we can provide is: how do you build one? This is an even more important question because, upon reflection, no client really needs either SAP or a large systems integrator to do so.

That is my final take-away from SAPPHIRE 2010: it is time to show clients how it’s done. That will be the subject of my next post. Stay tuned.