The Case for Business Agility in the SAP Dominated Enterprise

This article was published in the JOURNAL OF PRACTICAL CONSULTING.

Full article: http://www.regent.edu/acad/global/publications/jpc/vol1iss1/dasgupta/dasgupta.htm

Synopsis: 

Business agility can be achieved in a SAP dominated enterprise by creating process-centric systems through the use of Business Process Management (BPM) techniques and tools. Such a system would be deployed through the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) methodology on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) platform. We should seek to (a) create Process Centric Systems by using BPM to converge business applications towards process-oriented enterprise computing by capturing all process-knowledge via modeling, (b) embrace a SOA-based open systems architecture using SAP's Enterprise Service Architecture (ESA) as the blueprint for implementing a service oriented business architecture through SAP NetWeaver, and (c) adopt MDA as our system deployment methodology by using Model Driven Architecture (MDA) as the modeling-based software development approach that ultimately deploys the processes on the computer. SAP's Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA) already embraces SOA and BPM and can be extended to utilize MDA concepts. ESA strategy is about better aligning IT with the business. But ESA goes far beyond a technical theme or fad. ESA is the dawning of new agile, process centric focus within IT organizations.

Feedback to: probal.dasgupta@sapbureau.com