Enterprise SOA

Why so many questions?

If the questions and ideas mentioned so far sound interesting, then you are ready for the rest of this book and you are ready for the format.

When we sat down to write this book, we were quickly awed by the breadth of topics under the ESA umbrella. ESA starts with a perspective on how business should view IT through modeled processes and information entities and then explains how applications should be constructed and technology should support these applications along with a range of related issues. It would easily be possible to write a book about just the business perspective, the application perspective, or the technology perspective. But to really provide a service to the SAP community, our mission was to write a book about all three. Covering ESA at all of these levels represented the first challenge.

The second related task was to provide a way to choose what topics to include. To cover these perspectives meant we had a lot of territory to map out and then navigate. Within each perspective there is a wide variety of material. The question we struggled with was how to guide readers to the material that was most useful to them.

Most technology books do this by constructing a narrative or a story that explains things from one perspective. The problem with that approach is that whichever perspective we chose to use to organize the narrative would leave the other two groups searching for what they needed to know.

Our solution was to imitate one of the forms of ...