Emerging Best Practices for ESA Adoption Highlight SAPPHIRE SOA Content (AMR)

Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA) is the defining strategy for SAP and its customers that want to use technology to be more flexible and responsive to business change. At SAPPHIRE this week, SAP showcased several customers, including Intel and Whirlpool, that shared their experience in adopting the NetWeaver technologies combined with core SAP applications to start building out their own ESA.

The use cases varied from connecting to product data pools for data synchronization to a composite application for managing the expense process. Even with the differences, several clear best practices emerge:

• Consistent service definition—As we have seen with many customers looking at service-oriented architecture (SOA), perspectives on what a “service” actually is differ. Companies must, therefore, get agreement on how they are going to define different classes of services and how that data will be maintained. One company described its taxonomy of services, essentially a metadata repository that defines how services are consistently created and maintained.
• Master data management—SOA and the distributed nature of composite applications expose inefficiencies in how data is managed and synchronizes. Once these customers started their ESA journey, it became almost immediately clear that success would be impossible without the ability to synchronize and harmonize data across different systems.
• Pick the right process—Even though people identified different processes to start their ESA journey, each implementation was targeted at solving a distinct pain point for that company. The reuse benefits of SOA are not totally realized after the first project. In fact, the costs are often higher by taking this approach. One customer estimated a 20% to 30% cost overhead to develop services that supports reuse. He said the payback is five times better, but it’s not immediate.
• Don’t oversell SOA—The flexibility and responsiveness that SOA promises is very appealing to business customers. However, the technology is still evolving, and many standards for interoperability are still not mature. Companies must set the proper expectations about what is possible today.
• Get help from SAP—This was perhaps the most consistent theme among customers. Broad industry expertise in the newer NetWeaver technologies (like Xi) is still lacking, so customers used SAP consultants to help with the implementation. Having the internal connection to development personnel within SAP was vital to success—and something that only SAP can provide.

These are just a few examples of the best practices emerging from those that have embarked on an SOA strategy. Some of these are specific to SAP, but most are applicable for any application landscape. Has your company identified some clear best practices for SOA? If so, we would love to hear about them or any other comments related to ESA or SOA: e-mail me at dgaughan@amrresearch.com.
© Copyright 2006 by AMR Research, Inc.