mySAP™ ERP For Dummies®

Chapter 5. Keeping IT Flexible

In This Chapter

• Revisiting the need for a common language between IT and business people

• Making services granular

• Figuring out how abstraction cuts down on complexity

• Understanding how best practices and custom development options keep you flexible

In the preceding chapters, we talk about how service-enabled mySAP ERP helps your enterprise differentiate itself, makes your people more productive, and helps you gain business insight. The last piece of the puzzle is how this all helps the people who live in your IT world to connect with your MBA and accounting types.

That's what this chapter is about. We explore the way that services help IT speak business's language by making business processes granular, and how best practices out of the box provide solutions while leaving room for flexibility when it comes to custom applications development.

Creating a Common Language for IT and Business

Throughout this book, we talk about the need for a common language between IT and business people. This is such an important concept that we're going to revisit it for a moment in a little more detail.

Syntax, meet semantics

Here's an analogy: If you have teenagers, think about that relationship. Do you understand them? Do they understand you? Of course not. Even though you speak one language (for the most part), you have different experiences and you have different expectations.

In the business world, there's business-speak and technology-speak. In the past, it was painful to ...