Chapter SEVEN. Creating a Roadmap with the ESA Adoption Program

As this book has elucidated thus far, ESA provides a technical and business blueprint that can help large organizations structure and manage their IT resources in a flexible and efficient mannerindeed, in a way that provides unprecedented agility in business processes with no sacrifice in either IT performance or cost.

But what does an organization need to successfully adopt ESA? What steps must it take to get from here to there to implement this powerful idea in a way that assures achievement of its full potential yet with minimum risk? Where do business managers or the IT team begin, and what path do they need to follow?

Fortunately, as new as ESA is, there are solid, proven answers to these questions. Building on years of experience in helping customers to apply the latest IT methods and concepts, SAP and its consulting partners have worked out a rigorous and field-tested method for adopting ESA. What follows here is a step-by-step description of this adoption process and the thinking behind it. The description will necessarily be general, suited for readers in every industry, but the industry-specific examples that follow will help to illustrate in detail how the process is likely to unfold.

No single set of rules or methods is likely to address every enterprise's exact and specific needs. Those needs are by definition shaped by the pressures peculiar to each enterprise's internal makeup and strategy, its industry, and the business ecosystems within which it operates. High-technology manufacturers and chemical makers, for example, face radically different challenges in business and IT. While there is enough that's common to all enterprises in all industries for an essential ESA adoption process to be developed and put into practice with measurable results, there's no hard and fast rule that customers must adhere to SAP's adoption process. Clearly, some companies will alter the process described here in ways that suit them, and others will find success through using the process more or less as is.

Let it be noted that there's no magic involved, nor the need for any fancy new software or hardware. The first and most important steps in adopting a service-oriented architecture (SOA) are simply serious and fairly involved thinking and analysispreliminary groundwork that will ultimately pay for itself many times over. Business managers and the IT team will work closely toward a goal of essentially reconceiving how the organization's business processes and IT systems should relate to each other in the context of the higher-level business strategies that they are jointly intended to support.

As SAP has outlined this adoption process, the enterprise will not work toward a "big-bang," all-or-nothing ESA implementation. That would be a mistake and likely a recipe for disaster, as has been proven repeatedly since the dawn of IT. Instead, the initial focus falls on a carefully selected set of business processes, or perhaps even a single process, whose decomposition into a set of enterprise services can yield positive operating results within a relatively short period. Speedy results, in turn, can be used to advertise and propagate the ESA vision throughout the rest of the organization, creating sincere demand for the benefits it has shown it can deliver. Indeed, if all goes well, a self-perpetuating snowball effect will take over and ESA will essentially sell itself to everyone who can use and benefit from it.

The benefits of this step-by-step approach are obvious. Perhaps especially in IT, it is usually better to walk before trying to run. One gain is simply political: if IT is able to showcase a successful, albeit limited, implementation of ESA as quickly as possible, the enterprise will be better positioned to win a buy-in from executives and line-of-business managers. Their support, after all, will be critical to the success of a full-blown, enterprisewide implementation of the new services-based architecture. The incremental approach also helps lower an organization's exposure to risk because it facilitates change management processes, such as staff training, which are necessary for any successful change-of-technology strategy.