EMPLOYEE SPOTLIGHT - Jérôme Monteu Nana

A Born Optimist Who's Dedicated to Africa

by Michael Zipf, SAP Global Communications 

A delegation from Africa is visiting SAP; a Cameroonian or other African university wants its students to learn about SAP software; a diversity event featuring African culture is being planned in Walldorf. In cases like these, SAP employees generally turn to Jérôme Monteu Nana for help and advice.

Jérôme is a “go-getter” in the best possible sense of the word, and he’s an expert on francophone Africa too. And it is not just SAP that benefits from his wide network of contacts and tireless commitment to his home country. He is the founder of Europe’s first ever cooperative of Cameroonian “diaspora” (people who have settled far from their ancestral African homelands) and of the German Association of Cameroonian Engineers and Computer Scientists.

He is also an executive member of the Global Cooperation Council (GCC Forum), which promotes dialogue between the northern nations and Africa, Asia, and Latin America. “I have to invest a great deal of time in these official duties on top of doing my regular job. But I don’t see this extra work as a burden,” says Jérôme, who works as a scrum master in Financial Accounting/New Analytics. “I just want to do what I can to work for progress in my home continent.”

Cameroon-born Jérôme came to Germany in 1991 to study electrical engineering – specializing in process information technology – in Wuppertal. Even then, he was active in the service of others – as manager of a club for African students. Ever since leaving Cameroon for Europe, he has always given a great deal of thought to what he and other “diaspora” like him can do to help promote Africa’s development. “It’s all about sharing the knowledge you acquire abroad with the people back home,” he says.

Networker and fundraiser

After graduating, Jérôme worked at a subsidiary of Deutsche Bank, where he came face to face with SAP solutions for the first time. The two must have “gotten along well together” because he applied to SAP soon after and began working in Walldorf in September 2001. Not surprisingly, he was quick to make contact with his African colleagues and founded the “African Community at SAP” (AC@SAP), which currently has about 20 active members. AC@SAP is part of the Cultures@SAP employee network and is involved in collecting donations and supporting a wide range of CSR initiatives, such as providing aid for schoolchildren in Rwanda. “We also share our experiences and come up with ideas of what we can do for Africa,” says Jérôme.

The fact that this is by no means easy in a continent that is plagued by extreme poverty, conflicts, and corruption does not deter him.  “I’m an optimist and I tend to focus more on the progress that we manage to make,” he says. And progress is visible. For example, with the help of the SAP University Alliances Program, Jérôme has helped ensure that an increasing number of universities now teach information and communications technology (ICT) – so that Africans can share in the opportunities offered by mobile communications and other innovative technologies.

It sometimes takes years to convince African universities of the benefits of this kind of education for both teaching staff and students and of a collaborative partnership with SAP, says Jérôme. But there is a growing realization that IT can lead to greater prosperity and that business software can help fight corruption and create better-run companies.

All-round Commitment

“There’s obviously still a long, long way to go,” says Jérôme, but the growing interest among African universities in cooperating with SAP is encouragement enough for him to continue visiting a university to present SAP and the University Alliances Program every time he travels to Africa. It’s important for him that both sides benefit from his commitment: the people of Africa and SAP, which is expanding its position on the African market and helping combat the shortage of SAP specialists there.

Together with his wife, who works in Germany as a doctor, Jérôme wants to show his three young children (aged one, three, and five) that dedication to a cause is worthwhile. “If we try hard, we really can achieve something,” he says. Even though his children are growing up in Germany, Jérôme wants them to know that Africa is their second home. “It’s important to do what you can for people wherever they live,” he says, “because – in the end – they’re all equal.”

FIVE MINUTES WITH KIRSTEN SUTTON (MANAGING DIRECTOR, SAP LABS CANADA)

An interview by Angela Schuller, SAP North America News


Talk about your left brain/right brain balance: Kirsten Sutton, Managing Director of SAP Labs Canada, graduated from culinary school, holds degrees in Linguistics and Creative Writing/English and leads a national team of 1,600 people who design and build solutions that help businesses run better. In January, she received SAP’s Distinguished Leader Award, which acknowledges Kirsten’s exceptional leadership with her Canada Labs teams and within SAP Canada overall.

Angela: What projects are you currently working on that you are excited about?

Kirsten: It’s the work to bridge the Lab organization and the Field organization that I’m most excited about. By that I mean getting our Developers in touch with our customers and, in turn, having our customers meet the people who have designed and built the solutions they use every day to help their business run better.
As a developer in the Labs, your work is often very specific and project based. Rarely do you get to see beyond the component you’re working on. But give them a chance to speak directly to a customer and listen to how they are using our products…it’s transformative. One developer described it this way:  
“I was blown away by a lot of what I saw that day. It opened my eyes to how impressive and suitable purpose-built industry mobile apps are and how excited SAP customers are about using them.”
For our Field team, understanding that the Labs is another asset they can bring to the table to create a unique customer experience, gives them that edge to make a bigger, faster or more meaningful sale and ultimately a stronger relationship with our customers.
Everything for me always comes back to food. It’s like the dynamics in a restaurant. The Lab is like the kitchen: people don’t often see the team producing the fantastic product they are enjoying. The Field, is like the front of house, filled with servers, bartenders—people you always see. But on that rare and special occasion, there’s that moment when the Chef walks out into the dining area and greets everyone and it all comes together to create a totally unique experience. That experience is what I’m excited about making happen. Everyone benefits – it’s good for our Labs employees, our Field team and for our customers.

Angela: Tell us one thing people generally don’t know about you.

Kirsten: People see me dressed up every year for Halloween but are usually shocked when I tell them I made my costume myself. And I don’t just make them for me, but my whole family. Every Halloween for about the last eight years I’ve made costumes based on a theme of some kind. For instance one year we were dressed up like characters from Alice in Wonderland; another year it was The Incredibles and then The Little Mermaid. This year we’re going to be Merida, Queen Elinor and King Fergus from the movie Brave

I don’t know why I like to do it! <laughs> Maybe it’s the challenge. One year my daughter said ‘I want to be SpongeBob for Halloween’ and right away I started to think ‘Hmmm, how am I going to do that’.

Angela: As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?

Kirsten:  This is a hard one, because it would change; there are a few moments in time. Let’s start with when I was really little, maybe four-years-old. I wanted to be a gift wrapper like you see at the mall. Then when I was a bit older, I was constantly rearranging the furniture in my bedroom. I was about ten and that was when I wanted to be an Interior Designer. Finally in high school I decided to become a Chef, trained for it and worked in the industry for several years, to help pay for university, actually. I secretly still want to be a novelist, tv sitcom writer and a professional poker player, but those are going to have to wait for retirement…

Angela: What are some of your passions and hobbies that you enjoy outside of the office?

Kirsten: Food for sure and there’s a story I have about combining your passion and your work. Our office in Vancouver was the only SAP Lab office without a food program (cafeteria or otherwise). So people either brown bag it or eat at any one of the 75 or so restaurants in our neighbourhood. So when it came time to look at options on implementing a program, I saw a big opportunity.

We worked with the local Business Improvement Association and created Lunch on Us—a reloadable card that only SAP employees can use at 42 restaurants (we started with 12) – so now our neighbourhood restaurants are our cafeteria. Our team took it one step further and created an app for it as well. So, for instance, you can shake your iPhone to choose a place to eat, which I’m always doing; it’s linked into twitter feeds; it can tell you how long the line-ups are and even tell you what your average spend needs to be if you want to stretch your budget to the end of the quarter. [NA News note: With the success of Vancouver’s ‘Lunch on Us’, SAP Labs Toronto recently rolled out a similar program.]

Angela: If you could have dinner with anyone, living or not, who would it be and why?

Kirsten: You know, as a trained chef this question always puts me into a cold sweat! It’s the idea of having to choose one person. How about three? I’d start with King Tut. I’m fascinated with Egyptian history and I’d love to find out the real story about how he died. Next would be one of my all-time favourite writers, Shakespeare. He did some of the best writing—even some of the best insults! I think it’d be a lot of fun to share some wine and listen to him make fun of people he didn’t like. I’d ask all kinds of questions and get to the bottom of the did-he-write-all-that mystery. And third, I’m wavering between Julia Child and Jamie Oliver. But I’d choose Jamie. I’ve been cooking a lot of his meals lately.

SAP and NFTE Challenge Young Entrepreneurs

Jacqueline Montesinos Suarez
Head of Corporate Social Responsibility, SAP North America

Dean Sivara, VP of Ideation at SAP, visits high school classrooms throughout the San Francisco Bay Area to promote and recruit students to the SAP Tech Innovation Challenge, developed with the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE).

The SAP Tech Innovation Challenge incentivizes young people from low-income communities to pursue business ideas using technology (such as websites and mobile apps). NFTE Bay Area students who participate in this Challenge are invited to attend workshops with dedicated SAP volunteers in Palo Alto to refine details of their business plans. Later in the spring, Challenge participants and NFTE students across the country present their business plans, with the goal of advancing to the National Youth Entrepreneurship Challenge. Finalists compete to win cash prizes and NFTE recognition. Past winners created innovative businesses such as “New Types,” a service company that provides individualized computer tutoring in the homes of senior citizens and “TattooID,” which sells temporary safety tattoos for children.

Dean has worked with NFTE for several years, and submits they are an ideal partner for SAP. “Their focus on empowering young people to discover their entrepreneurship spirit needed in the business world is invaluable. I am always inspired when I talk to the students. Their ideas are incredible and it’s important that SAP supports great programs like this,” he says. SAP hopes to build on the success of the 2013 Tech Innovation Challenge to take this to the national level by 2014.

The Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship inspires young people from low-income communities to find their paths to success. They work closely with educators in high-need schools to re-engage students in learning, introduce them to business concepts, and open up their possibilities for the future.