Within the Integration Assessment, you are faced with so-called questionnaires, which are a list of questions used during the request process. Therefore, they contain questions about your integration requirements. With the Integration Assessment Tool, you are able to either use predefined questionnaires provided by SAP, or custom questionnaires. From a technical perspective, you are able to use interface request questionnaires, or from a business perspective, business solution request questionnaires. This helps your enterprise to capture the interface requirements in a structured way, as the system uses the results of the questions for intelligent technology recommendations. So, the technology mapping determines the suitable integration technology, depending on the answers to the questions.
However, before diving deeper into the questionnaires themselves, it is important to understand the key characteristics within SAP Integration Assessment as the questions are structured along these defined key characteristics. Those key characteristics are therefore criteria that help enterprise and integration architects to map integration styles to relevant capabilities of integration technologies. The Integration Assessment tool is equipped with the following key characteristic groups:
Key Characteristic Groups of the SAP Integration Assessment Capability
| Key Characteristic Group | Key Characteristic Examples |
|---|---|
Connectivity Contains criteria important to implement connections between the systems of the enterprise landscape. |
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Integration use cases Contains patterns, or reusable solutions for recurring integration problems, for the data integration and process integration style. | Patterns relevant for the data integration style: Common use case patterns (including relevant cross use cases) for data integration. |
| Metadata management | Data cataloging: Allows you to discover, classify, and profile data to be stored in one central data catalog. |
| Monitoring and operations | Business-oriented monitoring: Allows business users to monitor the execution status (including errors) of integration scenarios. |
| Transformations | Data transformation: Level of data structure transformation (such as mappings) and/or data translation that is required for the receiving system to consume the data. |
When it comes to questionnaires within Integration Assessment, these key characteristics work as the basis for those, as they guide you through the interface request process (during the requirement analysis phase).
You will see the key characteristics throughout the following lessons and exercises again.
Describe Predefined Questionnaires
In the Integration Assessment Tool, you have the option to review the predefined questionnaires by navigating to Settings → Questionnaires:
By choosing a name of a predefined questionnaire (for example, Interface Request → Questionnaire for the Data Integration Style), you are provided with further information on this specific questionnaire, for example, with metadata like Name, Description, Style, and Status under Properties, and a list of questions under Sections:
Under the list of questions, there are different attributes listed for each question:
Attributes per Question
| Attribute | Value |
|---|---|
| Position | Position of the question in the questionnaire |
| Question | The text of the question |
| Type | Possible values are:
|
| Answer-Source | Source where to retrieve the answer to the question. If Key Characteristic is shown, the possible answers to the question are given by the definition of the key characteristic. |
To follow the given example, it looks like the following when choosing the first section Integration Use Case Patterns:
Creating Custom Questionnaires
On the same interface where we started the previous lesson, you can also create new questionnaires by choosing Create on the upper-right corner:
As you can see, it is possible to define two different types of questionnaires, either a Business Solution Request or a Style Request. Both parameters differ in its characteristics as follows:
Differences in the Characteristics of Style and Business Solution Requests
| Request Type | Type of Questionaire |
|---|---|
| Style Request | Questionnaire for a dedicated integration style. Use this kind of questionnaire to guide the user through the creation of an interface request. When creating an interface request, the business domain expert needs to specify a dedicated integration style, for example, process integration. The associated questionnaire, therefore, also needs to be related to a dedicated integration style. |
| 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. |
In the following exercise, you create your own custom questionnaire, based on the information given in this lesson.
