Week 4 Discussion Comments: This was an unusual discussion because we were not all covering the same ground. This allowed us to learn about functions and features of many different parts of SAP and other Enterprise Software.

Lowell addressed the need for high availability of the parts of the SAP software that are critical to the business. I was happy to see that someone found the later chapters of the i-series document to be useful

How does SRM lead to a higher quality product? My take on this is that it allows you to gather information by supplier that you did not have before and this can be used to point out problems to the supplier and get them corrected.

Erica pointed out that SAP NetWeaver has integrated version control. Whenever you do development with multiple team members and many objects (programs, tables, business processes,....), it is important to be able to see an audit trail of changes made to any object and to be able to automatically drop back to prior states. It is impressive that these capabilities are present in the Netweaver Development Infrastructure.

Outsourcing: We had an unexpected but interesting discussion on outsourcing this week. Whenever part of a business process is performed in a remote location, training, documentation and formal communication become important. For example, it's not a good idea to take short cuts in system specifications when programming is going to be done remotely. What follows are my personal opinions

• Opinion 1: Did outsourcing lead us to the economic situation we are currently experiencing in the United States? Probably not. I am so old that I was working in 1973 and 1974 when there was a recession similar in size to the one we are now experiencing complete with a 40-50% drop in the US stock market. Some systems consultants at my company were assigned to do building maintenance and others were laid off because clients were postponing systems projects. At that time electronic outsourcing was not feasible so the lack of systems and programming work could not have been caused by outsourcing.
• Opinion 2: I remember learning in high school that the Hoot Smalley Act that was designed to protect jobs in the United States but instead started a trade war with Europe. The trade war may have turned a bad recession into the Great Depression. Hopefully the entire world has learned from this and there won't be another global trade war.

Housekeeping: Remember that you must post in the Discussion Board on three separate days. A number of you did not do this during Week 4. I deducted points for people who only posted on a single day.