Section 7.4. Is there more to success with ESA than just analyzing technologies and preparing roadmaps?

7.4. Is there more to success with ESA than just analyzing technologies and preparing roadmaps?

Yes, there is. Ultimately, implementing ESA across a large enterprise will depend on sociology as much as technology. It will depend largely on effective communications, for instance: training those in IT and in business units who will directly use and implement the new IT architecture. Stakeholders must be kept informed of what ESA means to them and their particular workgroups and organizations.

SAP has deep experience in addressing these issues, as encapsulated in its Customer Engagement Lifecycle, a set of best practices for planning, implementing, and operating major new IT solutions. The ESA Adoption Program is an ESA-specific variation of the Customer Engagement Lifecycle, since it helps the customer to understand how to define, adopt, and implement ESA.

One particularly powerful approach to fostering positive change in large organizations is to identify individuals who have sufficient understanding and charisma to serve as ambassadors of change. Because of the strong respect they already enjoy from others in the organization, such people can be major influencers, encouraging others to pay attention to the changes underway and to get on board, as it were. Once they've achieved success with ESA in a particular business unit, these "Black Belts," as General Electric famously called them during its campaign to spread the gospel of Six Sigma quality control, will champion the concept and get others interested and motivated to follow suit.

SAP's consulting group, and its consulting partners, can help with this process through formal service offerings. SAP also makes available the SAP Developer Network (SDN; http://sdn.sap.com), an online community and web site where ESA is currently one of the most active topics of discussion. Numerous tools, forums, and software downloads are available there. By May 2005, SAP had already created and presented a preview of about 500 enterprise services to its customers through SDN.

SAP's CIO Global Leadership Program provides opportunities for top IT executives to talk about what's on their minds, and here, too, ESA is an increasingly popular topic. Typically, some 30 CIOs are invited to spend a day together, talking to each other and with SAP executives about the ESA Adoption Program as well as about ways to innovate their companies, their experiences with ESA, and best practices and concerns.