Section 17.3. How does ESA decrease the need for IT governance?

17.3. How does ESA decrease the need for IT governance?

ESA reduces the need for IT governance dramatically. The reason for this is quite simple. Governance is about getting approval for changes, about power, about who wields that decision-making powerand how long such decisions take, given the speed of business change.

One way ESA significantly helps is by greatly reducing the incidence of decision making. Here is why existing enterprise servicesand as much as 80 percent of the enterprise services you will ever need will come from SAP in the Enterprise Services Inventoryare already standardized. These services are therefore freely available to business analysts not only to consume, but also to use in composing new applications. The number of building blocks in the box, so to speak, is enormous. The only time that decisions must be made is when you need a building block that you don't currently have. Over time, as more services are created (and approved), the number of blocks in the chest increases, and it becomes more likely that the service you need is already in that chest. In this way, the granularity of enterprise services reduces the amount of time you spend on such decision making by reducing the numberand scopeof the decisions to be made. Such decision making is incremental rather than sweeping, reducing hassles for all concerned. Meanwhile, because enterprise services are available for composing new applications and modifying existing applications without the help of IT, business gains an unprecedented level of flexibility to change business processes at a high level.