An Incremental Approach to ESA

By Sam Sliman
President, Optimal Solutions Integration, Inc.

When negotiating the service-oriented landscape, SAP customers are advised to undertake a controlled migration strategy to SAP’s enterprise service-oriented architecture (ESA). Moving deliberately, with clear objectives and a manageable scope is of key importance when it comes to cost control and monitoring the performance and ROI of an ESA migration plan.

The prudent path to ESA is marked by incremental adoption of service-oriented solutions as an enterprise gradually migrates toward an overall enterprise service architecture. Pilot projects serve well as ESA stepping stones, and enable full ESA adoption when a critical mass of services is reached.

By definition, a good ESA pilot is one that evaluates the technology and approach and determines whether a company should invest further to meet critical business needs. Properly executed, a series of interrelated pilot projects simultaneously serves as a controlled implementation methodology and a structured, cumulative learning process.

Tight IT budgets prohibit expensive, high-risk ESA pilot projects. Accordingly, the best ESA pilot projects solve some real business problem, and do so cost-effectively. Furthermore, since implementing ESA in an incremental fashion is a best practice, the ESA pilot serves well as a low-risk first step in the ongoing, iterative process of implementing ESA.

ESA pilots are exercises in architectural planning, modeling, and organization. Of course, an ESA pilot project should yield a working result and address a real business process need, but it is absolutely essential that an ESA pilot truly embrace architectural issues and best practices and not fall into the trap of simply building a one-dimensional Web service. Pilots often yield limited results, but those results should actually provide a real return on investment and offer a detailed blueprint for how business interacts with IT in forging an ESA strategy.

Goals for ESA pilot projects should be clearly articulated, and may include:

Developing a service that can be reused by multiple business processes Consolidating duplicate applications into one service or collection of services Showcasing a successful ESA implementation to clearly illustrate the benefits of reuse and consolidation Learning valuable lessons that can be leveraged in the larger ESA initiative Understanding the tasks involved in getting services into production as well as the day-to-day tasks required to manage ESA once it is in production

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