Introduction
In this unit, you get familiar with the step "Enable a Practice of Empowerment" of the Integration Maturity Level process. This step helps you to successfully complete the change from a non-systematic integration approach to a systematic integration approach in your company.
Following the explanations around these two stages, let's jump into the Integration Assessment tool again, so that you can expand your knowledge in working with the tool hands on, although the phase "Enabling a practice of empowerment" deals more with organizational topics which is mostly not covered by Integration Assessment.
You will go through guided exercises on how you can analyze your data within the tool via various integration assessment options and how you can create custom questionnaires.
The unit also includes a wrap-up of the overall learning journey and closes by showing you the road map of the SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology template and the Integration Assessment capability within the SAP Integration Suite.
Steps of Enabling a Practice of Empowerment
At the end of this lesson, you should be able to easily perform integrations yourself. This should be realized by giving you a holistic view of integration, establishing integration as a recognized discipline, and establishing knowledge sharing culture (best practices). Integration is positioned as a strategic differentiators as well, by establishing knowledge sharing culture (best practices) and improving communication between teams.
As you already learned in Unit 2 with SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology, this is categorized into three steps:
- Define integration role and set up an Integration Center of Excellence.
- Implement an integration governance process with certain integration standers.
- Enhance your existing Quality Assurance measures.
Analyzing Your Data
After achieving a Practice of Empowerment, you understand the organizational data and with that knowledge you can analyze it. By using the Integration Assessment tool, you can assess different data types:
- 1. Integration Areas
In the integration areas, the status of each combination of integration domains and integration styles is shown. This view enables you to assess your usage of integration technologies and the cover per pattern. In an axis diagram, the different integration domains (y-axis) and the integration styles (x-axis) display. By choosing the corresponding tile, you can see the related integration technologies and the related integration interfaces requests.
Note
This is only an example, as it only shows the Cloud 2OnPremise Domain for which the process integration is available. Therefore, the tile is marked green. All other areas are not assigned.
- 2. Integration Policies
In SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology, different stages of recommendation grades are provided, which you can assign to the integration technologies/services in your organization. By doing so, you can define integration guidelines for your organization, which include standard recommendations, reasonable alternatives, possible exceptions, or techniques you want to avoid in your organization.
In the following example, you can see the integration technologies for the cross use cases. You can also see the recommendation degree, rules, that should be applied, supported domains, and corresponding applications.
- 3. Applications Overview
The application overview provides the existing connection between one source application and a target application within the IT landscape.
In an axis diagram, you can see the target applications (for example, SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP ERP, SAP Ariba, and so on) and the source applications such as Amazon, SAP Fieldglass, or SAP Marketing Cloud. All available connections are marked with green.
Note
In this example, only the connection between the target application SAP Marketing Cloud and S/4HANA is available.
- 4. Integration Technologies Overview
With integration technologies, the scope of services and the use of middleware components are described. By using these, existing technology profiles can be adjusted or new integration technologies can be created, according to your organizational requirements.
The following example shows which integration technology is supported by which domain:
If you choose Styles (on top, next to Domains), you can see which integration technologies are supported by which styles (for example, cross use cases, process integration, and so on), or if you choose key characteristics (next to Styles), you can see which integration technology fits best to which key characteristic.
