There is one person in every SAP estate.
Everybody knows who it is.
Your Sherpa on Mount SAP...
The person everyone follows, because nobody else knows where the crevasses are.
The specialist everybody calls before making a change.
The person who remembers why a particular interface was built.
Which batch job cannot be touched.
Which custom program nobody dares to remove.
And what will quietly stop working if somebody gets it wrong.
I’ve met this person in utilities.
I’ve met this person in mining.
I’ve met this person in manufacturing.
Different industries. Different systems.
Same person.
I’ve sat in boardrooms where their resignation was the real agenda item.
Never mind what the presentation slide said.
Because everybody understood the same uncomfortable truth.
If that person left, a portion of the estate would leave with them.
For years, I accepted that as normal.
Then one day I realised something I couldn’t unsee.
We hired these people to run the estate.
To improve it.
To support it.
To guide it.
We did not hire them to become the record of it.
Somewhere along the way, the estate stopped being the record.
And the specialists became it.
That should concern all of us.
Not because those people are doing anything wrong.
Quite the opposite.
They’re often the reason the estate continues to function as well as it does.
The real question is this:
Why does an organisation depend on human memory to explain what already exists inside a system designed to record it?
For twenty years, we accepted that dependency.
I’m no longer sure we should.
Your specialists were hired to run SAP.Not to remember it.
First published on LinkedIn, 20 October 2026.