Enterprise SOA

Chapter SEVEN. Creating a Roadmap with the ESA Adoption Program

As this book has elucidated thus far, ESA provides a technical and business blueprint that can help large organizations structure and manage their IT resources in a flexible and efficient manner—indeed, in a way that provides unprecedented agility in business processes with no sacrifice in either IT performance or cost.

But what does an organization need to successfully adopt ESA? What steps must it take to get from here to there to implement this powerful idea in a way that assures achievement of its full potential yet with minimum risk? Where do business managers or the IT team begin, and what path do they need to follow?

Fortunately, as new as ESA is, there are solid, proven answers to these questions. Building on years of experience in helping customers to apply the latest IT methods and concepts, SAP and its consulting partners have worked out a rigorous and field-tested method for adopting ESA. What follows here is a step-by-step description of this adoption process and the thinking behind it. The description will necessarily be general, suited for readers in every industry, but the industry-specific examples that follow will help to illustrate in detail how the process is likely to unfold.

No single set of rules or methods is likely to address every enterprise’s exact and specific needs. Those needs are by definition shaped by the pressures peculiar to each enterprise’s internal makeup and strategy, its industry, ...