Integration Assessment Overview

Integration Assessment, a capability of SAP Integration Suite, implements the Integration Solution Advisory Methodology thus supporting the definition of your organization’s integration landscape. It helps you to define integration patterns and to ensure consistent usage of the integration technology.

Integration Assessment allows you to assess the integration strategy for your organization in a structured way. It helps you to determine the integration technologies that best suit your requirements.

SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology

SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology (ISA-M) is a structured approach for defining an integration strategy for your organization.

The basic approach to ISA-M is that in the first phase you specify certain technology-agnostic integration requirements relevant for your organization’s integration strategy (integration domains, integration styles, and integration use-case patterns). In the second phase, you map these criteria to those integration technologies that best fit to your customer context.

Methodology

Integration Assessment uses SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology (ISA-M).

This methodology:

• Helps you to create a representation of the integration reference architecture for your organization in a structured way.

• Helps you to specify technology-agnostic aspects relevant for your organization’s integration strategy (such as integration domains and integration styles) and to map these aspects to the best suitable integration technologies.

• Guides you through the interface request process and provides smart technology proposals for your organization’s context.

Integration Assessment Process

Define, document, and govern your integration technology strategy.

Integration Assessment provides you with the necessary tools to determine the most suitable integration technology strategy.

The way in which you assess your integration strategy is based on the SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology (ISA-M) (see SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology).

This method ensures a structured assessment process.

The following figure shows the overall process for assessing your integration strategy using Integration Assessment:

Review and Adjust ISA-M Settings

Settings include the SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology (ISA-M) master data. This data acts as the initial setup for completing the integration assessment.

Integration Domains

Integration domains provide the entry point into ISA-M and can be used as a “big picture” for integration. They describe typical areas in a hybrid landscape where integration is needed. Integration domains are technology agnostic and can therefore also help in creating a blueprint for a hybrid integration platform consisting of multiple integration services/technologies (SAP and non-SAP).

Integration Styles

An integration style describes a basic category or type of integration, for example, process integration or the integration of things.

Each integration style has specific characteristics. You can refine each integration style with use-case patterns.

When you select the Process Integration style, you find the following use case patterns:

• B2G Integration
• A2A Integration
• Master Data Integration
• B2B Integration

Integration Use Case Patterns

You can refine each integration style with use case patterns that describe frequently found integration use cases in enterprise landscapes. You can do an assessment of your integration architecture by adding the integration use case patterns that are relevant for your organization or that you want to further evaluate.

Integration Areas

An integration area is a combination of integration domains and integration styles. For example, the integration pattern IP-3 defines the combination of the cloud-to-cloud domain with the process integration style.

Key Characteristics

Key characteristics are criteria that help enterprise architects and integration architects to map integration styles to relevant capabilities of integration technologies.

When you inspect the relevant integration technologies at a later step, Integration Assessment defines the level of support for the key characteristic for each technology (indicated by a recommendation degree).

For each key characteristic, the following attributes are displayed:

Attribute	Description
Name	Name of key characteristic
Description	Description of key characteristic
Type	Possible values are: ▪ Multi    If you can give many answers to an associated question in a questionnaire. ▪ Single    If you can answer an associated question in a questionnaire with Yes or No.
Key Characteristic Group	Logical grouping of Key Characteristics. The possible values are: ▪ Connectivity ▪ Integration Use Cases ▪ Metadata Management ▪ Monitoring and Operations ▪ Transformations
Key Characteristic Values	The basis for predefined answers in a questionnaire.

Questionnaires

The questionnaire is a list of questions that is used during the request process. Integration Assessment differentiates between questionnaires predefined by SAP and custom questionnaires.

There are two groups of questionnaires: interface request questionnaires (technical perspective), and business solution request questionnaires (business perspective).

Property	Value
Name	Name of the questionnaire
Description	Short description of the purpose
Style	Relevant integration style
Status	Shows whether the questionnaire is active

You can also add your own questionnaires. Depending on the Request Type parameter, you can define two different types of questionnaires:

Request Type	Type of Questionnaire
Integration Request	Questionnaire for a specific integration request. Use this kind of questionnaire to guide the user through the creation of an interface request.
Business Solution Request	Questionnaire for a specific business solution request. Use this kind of questionnaire to guide the user through the creation of a business solution request.

Content Life Cycle

The Content Life Cycle update gives you the ability to incorporate relevant changes to the latest standard content, delivered by SAP, into your existing SAP standard content.

You can select/deselect the listed updates based on your requirements and apply them as the latest version of your dataset.

Congratulations! You are now ready for the next lesson!