Section 4.19. What are IT practices and IT scenarios?

4.19. What are IT practices and IT scenarios?

IT practices and IT scenarios are SAP's way of expressing the value that SAP NetWeaver provides and the mechanisms used to provide it. When facing any sort of IT project, whether it is ESA-related or not, IT practices and scenarios can provide another tool for analysis, such as the five Cs of ESA, that can help teams of people communicate more clearly about what they need to do.

IT practices are focused on the business impact of SAP NetWeaver rather than on isolated technology components. The idea is that when facing an IT issue, instead of thinking of the portal, a unit of functionality, you will think about user productivity, the goal. IT practices identify how you can use SAP NetWeaver to solve specific business problems familiar to almost any IT organization. IT practices are intended to evolve as business issues change. They are currently defined as shown in Table 4-1.

Table 4-1. IT practices

IT practice	Description
User productivity enablement	Helps users and groups improve their productivity through enhanced collaboration, optimized knowledge management, and personalized access to critical applications and data
Data unification	Consolidates, rationalizes, synchronizes, and manages all master data (e.g., customers, suppliers, catalog items, etc.) for improved business processes
Business information management	Increases the visibility, reach, and usefulness of structured and unstructured data
Business event management	Ensures that business events from multiple systems are distributed to the appropriate decision makers within the context of relevant business processes
End-to-end process integration	Makes disparate applications and systems work together consistently to perform business processes
Custom development	Rapidly creates new enterprise-scale applications to drive your company's unique advantages
Unified life cycle management	Automates application management processes and optimizes all facets of an application's life cycle
Application governance	Maintains an appropriate level of security and quality for your intellectual property (IP) and information assets
Consolidation	Deploys a consolidated technology platform with the ability to allocate computing power according to changing business needs
ESA design and deployment	Consolidates and standardizes basic processes while leveraging existing investments to compose new, distinctive business processes

Associated with each IT practice are a number of IT scenarios that support a process-oriented implementation approach. IT scenarios are not collections of technology, such as a portal or a data warehouse; rather, they represent the way that SAP NetWeaver will be used to address an issue related to the IT practice. IT scenarios break down the IT practices, allowing an incremental approach to implementing SAP NetWeaver functionality that maintains a tight business focus. Figure 4-8 shows the different IT scenarios associated with each IT practice.

Each IT practice has multiple IT scenariosor approachesthat organizations can use to solve a business problem. For example, the business information management practice lists the following IT scenarios:

• Enterprise reporting, querying, and analysis

• Business planning and analytical services

  Figure 4-8. SAP NetWeaver technology solution map

  

• Enterprise data warehousing

• Enterprise knowledge management

• Enterprise searching

For each IT scenario, second- and third-level maps list various IT activities that need to be performed along with systematic tasks for accomplishing each IT activity.

IT practices and IT scenarios bridge the world between IT's business challenges and technology implementation.