I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE...

...and it is scary.

Over the last couple of years, I spent a large amount of my time helping my employer (one of those little Mom-and-Pop operations, uh-huh) convert its enterprise management systems over to SAP. You may have heard of SAP or seen one of their ads in an airport - it’s one of those insidious business systems that seems like it’s poised to take over the known universe. “Nike runs SAP.” Big fat hairy deal. SAP is a German company (I forget what the SAP stands for, probably something like Schtopfen in Arschlochen Produktion) whose motto may very well be “Ve may haff lost der last war, but ve VILL be running t’ings vun vay or der odder!”

While I was engaged in this most-of-two-years-out-of-my-life project, a nagging thought occurred to me. I’m enough of a cynic to imagine that there is some little geek running around Frankfurt-am-Main who has figured out a way to stick a trapdoor into the SAP deep code. And in a decade or two, when just about every single business on the planet is on the system, BOOM - we’re gonna be in big trouble.

And I’ll be laughing, ’cause I saw it coming:

A Cautionary Pæan to the Future of Business

It’s January 2023 —
The global workforce marches to the tune of SAP.
We’ve unified the world’s industry,
And celebrate an age of business solidarity.
No single holdout — not one company
Dares fail to sing the praises of the holy SAP.
Together we all bow and bend the knee,
And the management consultants tell us, “Work will make you free!”
The one fly in the ointment? What if we
Are hostage to the software and the geek who holds the key:
“Unless you pay one trillion bucks to me,
I’ll pull the plug — shut down the world’s entire industry!”
Is it extortion? Not that I can see —
We’ll pay, and then we’ll write it off as a “consulting fee.”
So in our headlong rush to SAP,
Let’s not forget that business lunch is never, ever free!