Nicole Berg
VP & Head of Spend and Workforce IT Solutions
Nicole Berg started at SAP on an internship while she was studying law and business administration. Holding various working student positions, her ambition and her affection for the company started to grow. She also developed an interest in the software side of the business but feeling the magic of inspiring other people on the customer side of SAP helped her decide on the next steps of her career.
She started as an application implementation consultant and trainer, before she gained experience in advising LE SAP clients on process optimisation.
She has accumulated comprehensive experience as a senior leader of award-winning teams, before she participated in the Global Leadership Development Program sponsored by the board. She has led IT application operations for all on-premise landscapes for SAP as a whole company and has set up the Innovation Control Center (ICC) as a showcase to the Run SAP Standard.
“The industry was already moving in the direction of delivering value faster,” Berg explains. “Our internal release cycles at the time were quarterly and monthly. I changed it to weekly [five years ago] while I set up the Innovation Control Center and we still deliver weekly today. We changed the whole scenery as a Team.”
Agile working was already becoming a trend, and Berg’s CIO, has spotted that she would be an asset in pushing SAP forward. She was moved to head of application operations and took on the sponsorship of the agile transformation journey for SAP IT. “It was a beautiful time. My learning curve was tremendous.”
Her next step was to take on the role of the COO for IT. Her brief widened to include strategic partner management, the technical set up for M&As as well as all other CIO related cross topics.
Returning from maternity leave, Berg scaled back to parts of her former role, but after six months her ambition won out and she “could not hold still”.
The position she applied for – VP/ Head of Spend and Workforce IT Solutions – is her current role. And again, it is focused on transformation. “If a journey starts like that, I know I’m in the sweet spot because with all of my roles in leadership, I had always been asked to transform or set things up,” Berg says.
But it isn’t just more of the same. Working with cloud products requires an altogether more collaborative approach. Berg compares the role to Mance Rayder, the Game of Thrones character who unifies various tribes under a shared purpose. “In the end, I feel like I need to bring together all the pieces for our company to make the world for our end-users, customers and my employees better.
Nicole Berg is especially being valued for her wide-ranging expertise as well as her energetic, goal oriented and empowering leadership style and personality.
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