Building an ESA Blueprint

By Sam Sliman
President, Optimal Solutions Integration, Inc.

The central idea behind ESA is to move away from monolithic, highly customized, siloed applications and toward a standards-based, modular approach that enables end-to-end, enterprise-wide business processes.

Accordingly, implementation of an enterprise service-oriented architecture necessitates, first and foremost, a holistic view of a business’ IT landscape, operations and existing processes. This view, moreover, must extend beyond organizational boundaries to include the systems and processes of partners, customers and suppliers.

Accurately mapping out this holistic blueprint requires individuals who marry deep technical expertise with proven business experience. These individuals--a blend of system architect and business analyst--must have a solid grasp of global business process design and a realistic understanding of the cross-functional nature of core ERP, SCM and CRM systems.

‘Reusability’ is the star to which ESA’s value is hitched. As such, it stands to reason that before any ESA work can begin, a comprehensive IT and business process blueprint is on hand detailing all technology components, systems and business processes.

An enterprise IT and business process blueprint for ESA serves the following purposes:

Provides a foundation for a well-thought strategy that considers the impact of ESA on technology and tools, organizational alignment, methodology and processes. Serves as the basis for a phased ESA migration plan that makes sense for the organization, mitigating business and architectural risks while measuring potential for return on investment (ROI) through increased flexibility and responsiveness to changing market demands. Assesses the current state of readiness for moving to ESA by identifying existing best practices and gaps, as well as major opportunities for realization of benefits from ESA. Determines existing business and technology strategies, methodologies, processes, infrastructure, and enterprise application integration (EAI) and business-to-business architectures through interviews and document collection. Identifies overlapping business and IT functions with the intent of reducing or eliminating redundancies and overlaps through use of shared services. Identifies business processes that might be assembled by using shared services that bring together existing data and business logic across a heterogeneous environment.