Section 17.6. What processes make sense for approving new enterprise services?

17.6. What processes make sense for approving new enterprise services?

Discovering the right decision-making models and processes for approving enterprise services is a field still in its infancy. Clearly, dependencies must be considered, and redundancy is an important concern in building new enterprise services. However, companies are not alone in dealing with such decision-making processes. One model that all companies deploying enterprise services should consider is the Enterprise Services Community. This community, facilitated by SAP, is an important resource for all companies adopting ESA. Joining this community and participating in the process is a way to build new synergies. Local governance committees stand to benefit from participation in this community. For details on the Enterprise Services Community, see Chapter 6.

Governance is all about decision making, about who has the power to make those decisions, and about how quickly decisions will be made. We should clarify that ESA will not completely do away with the traditional tradeoff that has been made between uniformity and freedom. However, it will make that tradeoff much less painful and difficult for companies. The pendulum, as it were, won't swing as drastically as it has in the past between such disparate extremes. The granularity of services makes the decisions smaller. The separation of business logic from application logic gives businesses, for perhaps the first time, a clear way to divide governance issues along lines that make sense and offer all parties the flexibility they need to innovate while maintaining standards that keep costs low and efficiency high.