Understanding the SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology (ISA-M)

The scope and amount of integration is constantly increasing along the digital transformation of today’s organizations. This may include the transition of applications and technologies to the cloud which results in fast evolving hybrid landscapes. Furthermore, new business trends (such as API economy, Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A)) and new technologies, for example, Internet of Things (IoT) or Artificial Intelligence (AI)) come along with new requirements regarding enterprise integration.

In such a dynamic environment, enterprise architects find it challenging to identify an appropriate future integration architecture, which includes a hybrid integration platform that meets current and future integration requirements. Integration governance and a practice of enablement are key to mastering enterprise integration.

Furthermore, enterprise architects must also take the customer context into account, like the enterprise architecture strategy, existing investments, or skillsets which may also influence decisions regarding an enterprise integration strategy.

To help organizations tackle this integration challenge, SAP has introduced the SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology. It allows you to raise your organization's integration maturity level by moving from a non-systematic approach toward a well-defined approach to enterprise integration. Enterprise architects and integration leads can choose how to adopt and extend the provided accelerators to meet specific integration needs.

The SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology:

• Includes a technology-agnostic framework for defining and executing an integration strategy: This means you can also apply the concepts to integration technologies from other vendors.
• Delivers adaptable integration use case patterns, architecture blueprints and best practices.
• Covers all integration dimensions in today’s hybrid and diverse environments such as process, data, analytics, user, thing integration.

SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology is a customer-proven and mature methodology which has been widely adopted. It has got a community of ~2,500 participants of SAP employees, customers, and partners.

SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology helps enterprise architects shape the integration strategy for their organizations. It also offers integration blueprints to address enterprise integration challenges and provides guidance on choosing the right integration approach and tools.

The SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology offers a simplified top-down approach to performing such an integration strategy assessment which includes:

• Documentation/review of your integration architecture.
• Scoping of focus areas, for example, future building blocks.
• Use-case driven approach (technology-agnostic.)

The given figure shows the four phases of the methodology, which are:

1. Assess your integration strategy.
2. Design your hybrid integration platform.
3. Define integration best practices.
4. Enable a practice of empowerment.

Please watch the following video for a deeper understanding of these phases:

In this step, enterprise/integration architects assess the existing integration landscape and available integration tools. They review any integration tools or technology which plan to be phased out during the transformation, and prepare the interface inventory for the existing landscape if needed.

Integration Domains

Integration domains provide the entry point into SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology and can be used as a "big picture" for integration.

You can do an assessment of your integration architecture by selecting the integration domains that are relevant for your organization or that you might want to further evaluate. Next, you can list your current integration technologies/services (As Is) and also derive your future target architecture (To Be). Integration domains are technology agnostic and can therefore also help in blueprinting a hybrid integration platform consisting of multiple integration services/technologies (SAP or third-party). You could also remove integration domains that are not relevant in your organization.

SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology includes four integration styles, including process integration, data integration, user integration, and thing integration. After the high-level scoping of integration domains, enterprise/integration architects can identify the customer-specific integration use case patterns that are relevant to their organizations, and then associate the customer-specific use cases patterns with one of the integration styles.

Use Case Patterns: Each integration style can be refined by use case patterns which describe frequently found integration use cases in enterprise landscapes. Based on the same principles, the cross-use cases category comprises use case patterns that complement one ore more of the five core integration styles, for example, API-Managed Integration or Event-Based Integration. Use Case Patterns are technology-agnostic.

Extensible Library: SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology includes a typical set of use case patterns that you can use as a starting point for your organization. You can flexibly adjust the library of use case patterns to your specific needs, for example, by adding more customer-specific use case patterns or removing patterns that are not relevant in your organization. In the next slides, all use case patterns are described in more detail including an example in the context of SAP.

For most organizations, a single integration technology is not enough to support the variety of integration requirements. Therefore, you must design your hybrid integration platform by applying a combination of integration technologies to cover current and future integration needs. SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology guides you through this design phase. You map the set of scoped integration use-case patterns to integration technologies. While doing so, you can also consider context factors that may influence the selection of integration technologies, such as the enterprise reference architecture or your existing investments.

The methodology also provides sample technology mappings using the SAP Business Technology Platform portfolio to accelerate the hybrid integration platform's design. SAP Integration Suite offers a choice of integration tools to support a wide range of integration use-case patterns. This allows you to properly document the integration platform design, which can also help support investment decisions.

In the third step of the methodology, integration styles and use case patterns (all technology-agnostic) can be mapped to integration technology categories that must be used in your customer context (SAP and/or third party).

As you can see, this is not a 1:1 mapping: For some use case patterns, you may need more than one integration technology, and most of the integration technology categories support more than one integration use case pattern.

To keep pace with the volume of integration requirements needed to enable business transformation, you must scale out integration development work across your organization. With SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology, you can acquire integration best practices to support a distributed and agile approach to integration development. These best practices include:

• Integration dos and don’ts that act as guardrails for developing enterprise-grade integration scenarios.
• Architecture blueprints that describe which integration technologies to leverage in orchestration per integration use-case pattern, complemented with decision criteria that allow developers to find out which blueprint to apply and how.
• Integration guidelines to deliver best practices for designing integration scenarios, taking advantage of vendor-agnostic recommendations and implementable design patterns for SAP Integration Suite By taking advantage of proven best practices, your organization can reduce implementation time, effort, and cost while delivering a high-quality integration design quickly.

This section shows some typical key characteristics that are best implemented in the API management layer or the integration layer. It provides guidance for integration architects on how to combine both offerings and can be extended/adapted to capture best practices in your organization.

This section presents sample architecture blueprints in regards of integration technologies. Architecture blueprints can be defined by combining integration use-case patterns and integration domains. Choose the ones from the list of sample architecture blueprints which are relevant for your organization and define extra ones for your specific context as needed.

The digital era requires an agile delivery model for enterprise integration that quickly responds to evolving business needs. You must rethink responsibilities and processes to be able to deliver integration at scale. SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology is designed to support you on this journey as it enables you to embrace integration development outside of traditional integration practices.

You can use a catalog of personas with defined responsibilities in an integration context, which includes new personas, such as application developers and business users who are empowered to implement integration scenarios on their own. You can also explore options for setting up an integration center of excellence that best fits your organizational background. Finally, you must adapt your integration governance policies to better meet the needs of a distributed and more diverse integration practice. Apply the methodology to define such policies for the digital age while enabling integration quality at the same time.

The methodology includes frequently used integration roles in organizations, together with their typical responsibilities and some sample activities in the context of SAP. The concrete definition of integration roles depends on your specific customer context. You can use the outlined integration roles as a starting point and adapt/extend them to your specific needs. These roles, for example, can help you to establish an integration competency center within your organization and derive areas for self-service integration (for example, simple integration tasks covered by citizen integrators).

The shift from a traditional Integration Competence Center towards Integration Center of Excellence supports an agile and decentral integration development approach. An Integration Center of Excellence is responsible for applying the SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology at an organization which also includes integration coaching of a virtual integration community.

An Integration Center of Excellence based on agile building blocks can optimize tactical integration projects and empower strategic initiatives by also delivering data access, insights, and intelligence.