Can SAP Resources Determine if Something is True Through Belief in SAP?

Executive Summary

  • Many SAP consultants believe something is true because it is stated by SAP.
  • We review how reliable this approach is to determine what is true.

Introduction

We sometimes have surreal interactions on LinkedIn, where various pro-vendor individuals make unsupported claims.

Our References for This Article

If you want to see our references for this article and other related Brightwork articles, see this link.

Can Truth Come from Blind Belief?

The following statement was provided by Mohamed Judi, who, at the time of this comment, worked for SAP. He was asked to support his claims regarding our analysis and critique of SAP HANA.

This was our comment to him. The most interesting part was his response.

“I have confronted this author with an article responding to it, and Barbel has refused to answer any of the comments. If you are interested you can see this link.

Notice from the comment that Barbel refused to defend her article. Therefore, a person who can’t even say if she has decided if the article is fake news, but then claims the article is fake news is quite conflicted. Furthermore, it is clear that Barbel does not understand the topics covered in the article, has admitted to no understanding of the subject, and therefore is not in a position of domain expertise to make such a claim. Read the article to understand the implication. But there is an important lesson here.

If you don’t understand a subject, you cannot know if something is true of false by following a list of indicators for what is fake news. There is no replacement for domain expertise. “

Mohamed Judi’s Response

“Any comments I leave here are out of my belief in SAP’s vision and complete buy-in into our leadership strategy.”

This is an enormous punt and illustrates that Mohamed’s entire reason for believing in SAP is based upon what amounts to faith. And Mohamed accused Brightwork of being biased and creating FUD — however, here the question is, how does Mohamed know that our research is FUD? The answer is clearly that Mohamed does not know (we asked him repeatedly to discuss specific topics, and he refused to do so) and that Mohamed is using his blind faith in SAP to determine if something is true. This would mean that whatever contradicts SAP must naturally be false. This means that to not accept what SAP says as true means being accused of providing incorrect information or FUD about SAP.

Conclusion

Mohamed Judi and other SAP resources do not use thought in determining if something is true. They outsource their thinking to SAP, and they “believe” that what SAP says must be true. These people then present themselves as experts on topics without doing mental work themselves.