Discovering Services within the SAP Enterprise Architecture Framework

The North Star Architecture service approach can be used to support transformation programs. This support can be run jointly by customer and SAP teams or by only one of the parties. The core enterprise architecture domains covered are Business Architecture, Application Architecture, and Roadmap.

The service helps to establish and run architecture governance activities, such as confirming or defining architecture principles. This typically includes a regular (possibly quarterly) review of the target architecture and transformation roadmap.

Depending on the current maturity of the Enterprise Architecture Practice service can help to increase the value and effectiveness of using Enterprise Architecture as an enabler during complex transformations. This start with identifying a minimal but effective set of needed Enterprise Architecture Artifacts up to establishing a community structure to enable architects applying reference architecture and new methodologies and tooling.

No single service will demand that all modules will need to be delivered from left to right. We rather see a set of service components and recommend splitting up the overall delivery into more consumable delivery sub-patterns. The three depicted patterns shown are examples of a longer list of pre-defined patterns which are provided as part of customer engagements.

The benefit of the pattern is, that they come with a pre-defined aligned flow of inputs and outputs between the different modules.

The offering is grouped in modules that are further grouped in categories, which partially matches the Enterprise Architecture Methodology domains. It is beyond the scope of this training to go deep into delivers suitcases of each of the modules. The benefit of the approach is that many modules are no longer generic tasks like "Roadmap," but rather form a stringent set of often specific architecture work. During scoping specific modules can be identified and can be delivered in three levels of depth:

• Informal – This is only an outside in perspective of the topics.
• Light – implies on workshop with a limited but customer specific outcome.
• Focus – implies specific preparation calls and a dedicated customer specific delivery.

A North Star Architecture service delivery pattern is a pre-identified flow of pre-selected modules that solves a customer problem. ​ The modules are originated in one of the seven architecture domains depicted on the right-hand side.

Three Delivery Pattern Examples listed in this slide are:

• Business Transformation.
• SAP S/4HANA Landscape Transformation.
• Data Strategy / Transformation.

The values of Architecture Delivery Patterns are to accelerate service positioning, service scoping, and service delivery:​

• Positioning: typical customer problem statements can be addressed with our patterns. We demonstrate to our customers that we can solve their problem and have the required experience.​
• Scoping: we know from our experience that the modules of the pattern work together (prerequisites met, interoperability assured, level of depth defined). We can document that experience in the North Star delivery framework. Therefore, we are much faster than in an assemble to order approach on the modules.​
• Delivery: we have delivery experience for most patterns, examples are available.​

The Business Transformation Pattern has a strong focus in the Strategy and Motivation domain to:

• Explore new business models and link them to key differentiating business capabilities.
• Break down the Business Strategy from Strategic drivers to goals and priorities.
• Have a view on a value to be realized when implementing the strategy.

The used module on Capability and Business Processes are primarily used in connection to the business strategy and to lead to a high level initial logical Target architecture.

The roadmap and change management module are not used to define detailed IT oriented adoption plans but rather to define a business-oriented roadmaps explaining the sequence of new or improved capabilities to be adopted for value realization.

In the SAP S/4HANA Landscape Transformation service pattern the Strategy Mapping module is only used to qualify capabilities and initiatives in the roadmap.

Core elements of this pattern will asses the bassline and target architecture from the different architectural layers:

Business: What are new capabilities needed or pain points to be resolved

Application: What solution can be fulfilled by the SAP S/4HANA core system or what additional component need to be touched or supplemented?

To follow SAP clean core principles integration and extensibility are in focus and can be supplemented by technical architecture aspect which even can come into play when SAP S/4HANA Cloud private edition is in scope.

Depending on the landscape complexity the roadmap will heavily need an investigation on multiple alternative transition scenarios.

The last pattern we look into in this course is the one on "Data Strategy / Transformation".

From a business perspective processes will be an important dimension to look into, as processes are accountable to take data through from initial creation to deletion.

Core elements are the Data Architecture and Analytics architecture, which will investigate semantics of data domains, look at data lifecycle management and explore data analytics architecture.

Then analogy from business processes on the business side are integrations on the technical slide, as these implements the data flows across solutions. At enterprise architecture planning time, these investigation typically do not down to individual interfaces and their field-level mapping, but as integration complexity is a good indicator of the landscape healthiness, it is important to get an early picture on the target integration architecture esp. as this can change throughout the duration of a business transformation program.

This concludes the introduction of three our or more available architecture delivery patterns.