Enterprise SOA

Is there more to success with ESA than just analyzing technologies and preparing roadmaps?

Yes, there is. Ultimately, implementing ESA across a large enterprise will depend on sociology as much as technology. It will depend largely on effective communications, for instance: training those in IT and in business units who will directly use and implement the new IT architecture. Stakeholders must be kept informed of what ESA means to them and their particular workgroups and organizations.

SAP has deep experience in addressing these issues, as encapsulated in its Customer Engagement Lifecycle, a set of best practices for planning, implementing, and operating major new IT solutions. The ESA Adoption Program is an ESA-specific variation of the Customer Engagement Lifecycle, since it helps the customer to understand how to define, adopt, and implement ESA.

One particularly powerful approach to fostering positive change in large organizations is to identify individuals who have sufficient understanding and charisma to serve as ambassadors of change. Because of the strong respect they already enjoy from others in the organization, such people can be major influencers, encouraging others to pay attention to the changes underway and to get on board, as it were. Once they've achieved success with ESA in a particular business unit, these "Black Belts," as General Electric famously called them during its campaign to spread the gospel of Six Sigma quality control, will champion the concept and ...