In this first episode of ASUG Talks: Candid Career Conversations, season 2, we talk with Tim Nguyen, consultant for the SAP S/4HANA Digital Transformation Project. Tim discussed his path to becoming a SAP professional.
ASUG Talks Host Laurel Nelson-Rowe:
I am joined today on ASUG Talks by Tim Nguyen, who is a consultant for the SAP S/4HANA Digital Transformation Project and project member of the PMO at the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority or NTUA. Thank you, Tim, for joining us today on ASUG Talks. We're going to have a candid career conversation, and we're going to take a step back first. Let's begin our conversation with a little bit of your background. Where did you grow up? Tell us a little bit about that, and did that affect who you became as a professional? And if so, how?
Time Nguyen:
Hello and it's a pleasure to be here with you. To answer your question, yeah, I was born in Vietnam and I grew up all over the world. Part of it was spent in France. I'm fluent in French. I've been in the US for 48 years now. I feel very much American. Since SAP is a worldwide global product with a lot of people using it around the world, I suppose my international background has been a great help.
Nelson-Rowe:
Did you always want a career in information technology or when did that first strike you as a career path?
Nguyen:
Actually, not really. I had a degree in transportation and management from the University of Texas in Austin, and I was hoping to go to work for the airline, but things often take an interesting turn in life and I've traveled the world literally for my SAP world, SAP work rather, and therefore I've been more of an airline customer rather than an airline executive. But yeah, I didn't really seek out a career in IT. It just came to me and, after 26 years doing SAP and almost 30 some years of doing IT, I guess it's been a blessing and I'm having a lot of fun doing it.
Nelson-Rowe:
What did you want to do for airlines?
Nguyen:
I probably would be some kind of an airline executive overlooking customer service or in airline experience or in scheduling or in-flight planning or something like that.
Nelson-Rowe:
But you're a great user of airlines anyway.
Nguyen:
I do fly them a lot, yes.
Nelson-Rowe:
So ASUG puts together a few lightning-round questions and we ask our guests to really answer questions in two minutes or less. Your first lightning round question is to share with our audience your career highlights.
Nguyen:
So I've been very fortunate to have had a 42-year career in IT. I've done everything from building my own SAP consulting company in the ‘90s. I've led global service delivery when I was at Symantec Global Service in the mid-2000s. Then when I was at EMC, I was their SAP global technical evangelist. I had the opportunity and a hand in building some really groundbreaking and amazing solution for SAP customers around the world. I guess looking back, some of the highlights would be, of course, the recent go-live that I had at NTUA on Monday, November 14, 2022, when we went live with S/4HANA Utility 2021. That's the sixth major go-live in my career and arguably the pinnacle of my career because it was a very complex project. It was something that when we went into it, we didn't know how big it's going to be. Obviously other people saw how big it was, and that led to NTUA being nominated and actually winning the SAP Innovation Award as Utility of the Year for the Mid-Market.
Nelson-Rowe:
So that was number six, was the highlight? Will there be number seven, number eight, number nine?
Nguyen:
Well, I'm not planning on fully retiring yet. I did take a brief early retirement when I left EMC, but that didn't last very long. It's hard to tell, but yeah, it could be some more. We'll see.
Nelson-Rowe:
Okay. What's been your favorite job or role or responsibility to date, and why is that your favorite?
Nguyen:
So I've had some really interesting roles and responsibilities in my career, and you could argue it's a checkered career actually.
Nelson-Rowe:
Checkered, how so?
Nguyen:
Every career has its ups and its downs. I prefer to think on the upside. My current role at NTUA, as a consultant for the SAP digital transformation project and a member of the PMO of the project management office may be a very, very important role. As a member of the leadership team and the strategy team, we made an impact on the project and on how people do things. In fact, in this case, we had an impact on the life of the Navajo Nation people. So it's actually quite fascinating.
My favorite role is probably the one that I had at EMC when I was the SAP global technical evangelist there for SAP Global Solution. So in that role, I worked with engineering to create market leading solutions, and I worked with customers, help them with maximizing their investment in EMC technologies. I was one of the enabler of the EMC global sales force to help them explain the compelling value proposition.
Nelson-Rowe:
Great. You alluded to this perhaps already in one of your answers, but what's been the most challenging role and responsibilities? Is it the most recent go-live or another?
Nguyen:
The most recent go-live was not the big challenge. It was a challenge, don't get me wrong, but it wasn't a big challenge. People have asked me, "So how was it?" I say, "Well, arguably one of the best, if not the best of my career," because of planning that went into it. I often said that all of these go-lives are a 90% planning and 10% execution.
I think the biggest challenge I had was when I was asked to see if I could go to France to help EMC build the SAP business there. Again, they knew I was being able to speak French a little bit. At the time, I was telling my boss, Doug Edmonds, that yeah, I probably could order from a French menu or lunch or dinner, but you asked me to explain SAP in French, well, I'm not sure how that's going to fly. If you are in France, unless you speak French fluently, you're not going to be very effective. But I managed to surprise everyone, including myself, by actually being able to do all of that. I could not tell you how I did it. Obviously, part of it is being passionate about it, being able to enjoy doing it and believe in what you're doing. So in the end, yes, I was able to successfully help EMC.
Nelson-Rowe:
Technology is a language unto itself. It was almost like another language?
Nguyen:
In the world of complex technology like SAP, it's about the ‘why.’ Why would you do something? It's less about the ‘what’ and less about the ‘how.’ Of course there's a how as well, but it's about the why. When you connect, especially when you are in a mode to try to convince somebody to do something with you, then it's become much more of a why. Once people get it and the light bulb goes off and that's when you get into the how. The what is just there. A lot of people talk too much about the what, but it doesn't resonate as to why would I want to do that? Why would I need to buy your product? Why we should do X, Y, and Z, right?
So the most successful people today, they talk about the why. You name it--Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, people like that--it's all about the why. Why would you buy an iPhone, right? Many companies make phones, But Apple’s appears to be the most successful of all.
Nelson-Rowe:
How did that experience in France and with the SAP technology shape you for your future roles and challenges?
Nguyen:
It just reminds me that if there is a challenge, and there will always be challenge in life, that you have to think creatively out of the box and whatever to overcome the challenge. I guess if there's a lesson learned, if you will, is that you want to be optimistic and you want try your best to get something done. No guarantee you're going to succeed. But if you try your best and you are optimistic that it's going to work, then it'll be fine. That's pretty much the same thing with this go-live. There were numerous challenges, but we overcome them. It was not easy, but in the end, we’re live and that's all that matters.
Nelson-Rowe:
You said also that this most recent experiences, most recent go-live, benefited the Navajo Nation. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Nguyen:
NTUA is a business of the Navajo Nation and it's a public utility that serves the need of the Navajo people. It provides electricity, water, wastewater, gas and so on. So it's been using SAP for 20-plus years and it's running on an old version ECC. It was time to move to a much more modern version of product, S/4HANA, where it has much improved customer service and whatnot. It has a lot of things that only S/4HANA can do with embedded analytics and AI machine learning that we deployed as part of the intelligent asset management. Also, for the first time in NTUA history, we deployed a customer service portal. So it really changes how NTUA can service its customer and can deliver better service to its customer, which is mostly the Navajo people.
Nelson-Rowe:
Thank you. Perhaps we'll talk a little bit more about that in future conversations. On your education and training background, what helped you in particular as you traveled down your career path?
Nguyen:
To be honest, SAP is not something that's taught in school. It doesn't hurt you have a computer science degree, but I didn't, and most people I know do not. So a formal education is not necessarily a requirement for success, right? I think that you would be better off finding a way to be part of a project or more than one if you can learn on a job.
Nelson-Rowe:
So project-by-project?
Nguyen:
It's project by project, and you build your knowledge and your network, and you work, and you learn from others. In these days, in the 2022 onwards, any project that has innovation as part of its objective is really the best opportunity that you should pursue. Everyone can do a migration. But in the case of NTUA, it was incredible innovation with the embedded analytics and with the intelligent asset management. Yeah, those are the sort of thing that was part of your personal growth, part of your expertise development. Those are the sort of things that you want to be thinking about.
Nelson-Rowe:
Okay, great. Have you had mentors across your career path?
Nguyen:
I don't really have any real mentor. I did have some very good managers. They've encouraged me to think out of the box, just think differently. And at EMC, they say just do it and ask for forgiveness later. I think in a way, that's why is so successful. Things change, of course in the EMC that I used to work at, it's no longer there. It's now part of Dell, where the culture is a lot different. But the thing that I've always done is to think out of the box about do things a little differently, if possible.
Nelson-Rowe:
If possible?
Nguyen:
It's not always possible because you have to have the right manager to allow you to do those sort of things.
Nelson-Rowe:
To go ahead and do it and then ask for forgiveness? If possible, if you could narrow it down, you mentioned the word pinnacle before. What would be the highlight of your career?
Nguyen:
It could take a long time, but I'll boil it down to a few, probably three. At EMC, I think 2012 SAP HANA just came out as a database. EMC, because they sold storage product, and they sold disaster recovery, business continuity solutions, how do you protect an in-memory database? That was kind of difficult. So again, it's part of my job, how do we this? Of course, when you have a storage company with storage technologies, you can protect it from a technology point of view, but that doesn't solve the real problem, which is, it's a business problem. So we needed the participation of someone who knows the business. So I had a lunch conversation with a good friend of mine who works at Deloitte Consulting, and we decided we're going to put together a proof of concept to show that we can actually do a disaster recovery for SAP HANA over long distance, over hundreds of miles distance. We called it Project Rubicon. So if you Google Tim Nguyen EMC or Tim Nguyen SAP, it may still be out there. It's been a few years, it's almost 10 years now. So they may have taken it down, but the last time I checked about two years ago, it was still out there. So we were able to not only demonstrate that you can actually do disaster recovery for HANA. This is before SAP came out with system replication and all that. We actually did that. We demonstrated it, and we actually presented at Sapphire, I think it was in 2012.
Nelson-Rowe:
Groundbreaking at the time?
Nguyen:
Yeah, groundbreaking at the time. So that was the art of the impossible, if you will. The second highlight was when I was at Callaway. We migrated from ECC on Oracle to HANA. We achieved a world record for migrating seven and half terabyte. We presented this at Sapphire in 2017. That was quite uncommon. It was quite incredible.
Arguably the pinnacle was the recent go-live at NTUA. I say that because it's the first and only project in my 26-year career where I participated from A to Z. In other words, I started from the discovery process to the actual go-live. Most people don't even have the opportunity. Most people come in the middle, come in, start, and leave, whatever. So it was unique in that sense. It was a very ambitious project, with five separate workstream, everything from a complete refresh of the infrastructure to build out a private cloud to the migration to S/4HANA, using Fiori as a primary interface to the implementation of the customer service portal, of the embedded analytics and of the intelligent asset management. So, a lot there. It didn't seem like that big a deal when we started it, when we wrote the RFP. But of course, now that looking back, it was a lot. I guess people noticed and that's why NTUA was nominated and actually won.
Nelson-Rowe:
And received the award.
Nguyen:
Yeah, the utility of the year, part of the SAP Innovation Award at the SAP4U conference in San Diego this year.
Nelson-Rowe:
And you say innovation made the difference? Yeah, I think innovation is probably an important reason why NTUA won.
Nelson-Rowe:
Second lightning round question: If you could narrow it down, what are the three things you've learned from being in this field that people should know?
Nguyen:
Basically, you have to network a lot. You have to get to know a lot of people because SAP is so wide that no one knows everything. You can't. So you have to know a lot of people. The sharing of information is absolutely critical to being able to find a solution. It goes two ways. So it's a two-way street. You can't just take information, rather you have to share it back. That's why I'm doing this today with you, right?
I think that the other thing, like I said earlier, is to think out of the box and think of things differently, and then find a way to get people to agree with new ideas. Obviously, it's not always easy. In fact, it's very hard. But you find a way to get people to agree with your ideas and they support it, and they evangelize it with you, then it'll get accepted.
Nelson-Rowe:
One of your roles that you described when we began the conversation was as an evangelist. So that skill set has served you well over time, correct?
Nguyen:
Well, that's just a title that I gave myself, but-
Nelson-Rowe:
It applies correctly.
Nguyen:
It's part of believing in what you're doing and sharing that excitement with others.
Nelson-Rowe:
Which leads to the next question. You are passionate about what you do. What inspires that passion?
Nguyen:
Yeah, so I think it's hard to say. I think it's part of what I love to do. I think that if it helps other people in achieving what they want to achieve, then that that's something that is worth doing. If the end goal is something that is better than what we have today, and if I can in a meaningful way contribute to that, then this is worth doing. So that's where the passion comes from. It's very hard to explain that. Sure, you can be paid money, but that's not the end all and the be all. You can be paid well, but be in a really bad position, in a miserable position, miserable job. I've been there, believe me. That's not much fun either. But I guess one thing that I could say is that, if you are fortunate enough, like I have been to have bosses who appreciate what you do and let you do it, that will then increase your level of passion that much more.
Nelson-Rowe:
That supportive environment. As you reflect, what are you most proud of in your professional life and why? What's that one most-proud moment or experience?
Nguyen:
Well, like I said before, it's just a matter of being bold and being brave and think outside the box. Yeah.
Nelson-Rowe:
Do you most love the leadership position in terms of projects and teams or the participation in teams that are innovative?
Nguyen:
Well, it's really neither. If you are an expert, it is expected that you would contribute your expertise. So you can call it leadership if you like, but it's expertise. I found that at NTUA, which is quite interesting, their culture is one of consensus, which is very foreign to me actually. I've never been in a company where no one, not a boss will tell you, this is what we're going to do. It's always, so what do you think we're going to do? What should we do? And it's a consensus culture. After four years there, I've actually come to quite like it, but it was a big adjustment.
Nelson-Rowe:
What are the most helpful resources that you've used along the way, including ASUG resources?
Nguyen:
So ASUG has certainly been a resource and the ASUG community. That's why I have been and continue to be a volunteer since I think 2012, that's going on 10 years. So it's a lot of demand on my time and a lot of things. But what I got out of it is immense. That's why I'm willing to share and to give back as much as I can. I was the chair of the enterprise SIG. In that capacity, I was part of the team to choose many of the sessions of Sapphire. So here I was being asked to use my expertise to choose these sessions. But believe it or not, I learned a lot more from figuring out these sessions than actually even sitting at them. So ASUG certainly has been a big resource.
The overall network and SAP itself, if you're an SAP customer, you may or may not know, but as part of your enterprise support, you have access to amazing training courses online. That is at no additional cost to your company. These courses are absolutely fantastic. They are no charge. It's online. Some of them are actually live courses. Now, I don't have time anymore to do those courses, but I would love to participate in those. So yeah, explore that. There's a resource that can really be that game changer to allow you to obtain the expertise that you can't get anywhere else. Like I said, they don't teach anything in school, and if they did, it would be obsolete because it'll take us two years to create a course. By that time, stuff is no longer relevant.
Nelson-Rowe:
It sounds like even as you've put a lot of time and energy into sharing, you've gotten so much more back from it?
Nguyen:
Without question, without question. This project at NTUA, a significant part of a success because of the input of our peers, the people that I reach out to, reach out and ask for opinions and advice and so on. Without their insight and their lessons learned, we wouldn't be anywhere where we needed to be.
Nelson-Rowe:
Thanks. So third lightning round question: What are the three best pieces of advice that you'd give those interested in a career in IT, specifically people interested in an SAP project or journey?
Nguyen:
First, find an opportunity to be part of an industry project, one that has innovation in it. No substitute for knowledge and experience gives us that. Second is try to be "innovative" to be part of a project that has innovation as part of its deliverable. Again, you have to be at right place, right time. Like they say, it's never easy, never simple. But somebody asked me before, if I had two opportunities, which one should I choose? I say, well, I would choose the one with innovation. Even though it may be paying less money but just the opportunity to grow and to learn from that, it would make up for what you're going to be able to make in the short term.
Then the last point that we just talked about is to leverage the community and the networking, or this training that is available to you as an SAP customer, but really the community, all of the conferences. So I've been very fortunate in my career that conferences have been an integral part of my development--been to every Sapphire except two. In fact, there was a real possibility that I would actually be missing my first Sapphire this year because it was invitational only. It all worked out. I kept my streak of, I don't know, 22 Sapphires or something like that alive.
Nelson-Rowe:
What do you hope that the listeners to ASUG Talks take away from our conversation today?
Nguyen:
There's a Latin proverb, I think that's loosely translated to something like fortune favors the brave, or fortune favors the bold, or something like that. So I hope that this conversation would encourage whoever's listening to this to be bold, to have confidence in yourself and in the people who work with you, work around you. On occasion, if you’re allowed to think outside of the box, that's what it's going to take to get things done.
Nelson-Rowe:
So be bold. That's the theme. Thank you, Tim, for the conversation today, the candid conversation and your advice. We'll check in on those next projects that you take up. Have a great rest of your day and thank you to the ASUG Talks audience.