Every farmer I know owns more than one rain gauge.
Ask him why and you get a story for each.
Ask his bookkeeper and you get a much shorter one.
One was already there, nobody knows why the previous owner put it there.
One was bought after a bad year, the old one “never read right”.
One was a gift.
One sits at a far camp, the rain falls differently out there.
Different brands and shapes.
Each designed uniquely to get a trusted number.
Over time you learn the flaws of each.
This one under-reads when the rain comes from the east.
That one falls over in a west wind.
So you move it.
Or you buy a new one to cover for the weak.
And some, eventually, you stop reading.
You never take them down, you just read them less.
Every morning somebody walks the land, reads the trusted ones, and writes one number in a book.
The gauges never agree.
The number in the book? Judgement.
I grew up on a citrus farm.
I still keep a rain gauge in the city.
The neighbours stopped asking why.
I have met this farmer in every SAP landscape.
My previous posts were about people.
This one is about what we bought so that we would not have to depend on them.
A monitoring tool after the outage.
A code analyser after the upgrade.
An access review product after the audit.
A spreadsheet that outlived the project that created it.
Each bought for a good reason, by a sensible person, to answer a real question that mattered at the time.
Different vendors.
Different tools.
Each reporting on its own schedule, in its own language.
And after a while you learn their flaws too.
One catches what that one misses.
So you buy another.
Some of them nobody has read in a year.
All of them renew.
So somebody walks the farm.
Sometimes a BASIS lead.
Sometimes an architect.
Sometimes Finance.
The reports arrive, dashboards update.
And findings disagree.
And a person quietly spends part of every week writing one number in a book.
Then the steering committee meets and makes a decision on that number.
I saw this as what a mature SAP estate is supposed to look like.
Serious systems have serious instruments.
Then one day, reviewing our renewals with my finance director, it struck me.
We were no longer talking about the estate that runs the business.
We were talking about the other estate.
The one that exists to explain it.
Two software estates.
One runs the business.
The other measures it.
Both need licences.
Both need maintenance.
Both need somebody to govern them.
And the measuring estate never appears on an org chart,
because nobody ever decided to build it.
It accumulated, one good decision at a time.
One bad year at a time.
Here is the part the farmer already knows and we somehow forgot.
Our dam has a water mark on its wall.
It has carried the real number the whole time.
No organisation budgets for reconciliation.
Every organisation pays for it.
Most organisations think they run one estate.They pay for two.
First published on LinkedIn, 3 November 2026.