You can apply many accelerators of the SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology along a governance process for integration developments. The Integration Governance Process explains the various roles and the steps, tasks, and decisions involved in an integration process.
Integration developers can identify the right integration technology and approach applying integration best practices of the methodology. If no existing integration technology can fulfill the requirements, the developer can consult an integration architect at the Integration Center of Excellence.
To help customers and partners to introduce integration governance at their organization, SAP has released SAP Integration Suite Integration Assessment. This is a tool-based approach covering key parts of the SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology.
It helps integration architects to define, document, and govern an integration technology strategy for an organization. At the same time, the tool helps integration developers to identify the integration technology with the best fit to the specified integration requirements and in accordance to the defined integration strategy.
Integration Assessment is a new capability of SAP Integration Suite. However, its scope is not limited to the integration capabilities of SAP Integration Suite. SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology can cover integration technologies of all integration styles and is open to also include non-SAP integration technologies.
With the help of Integration Assessment, you can enable an agile integration practice with an improved collaboration among different personas: The integration architect, integration developer, and business domain expert. This is how each persona can apply Integration Assessment:
- Integration architects are responsible for managing and maintaining the SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology master data such as integration policies. They can also build more advanced questionnaires for guiding integration developers to the right integration products.
- Business domain experts specify high-level integration requirements from a business perspective by applying a business solution request. If the SAP-delivered example doesn't meet all needs, it is also possible to define a more advanced custom business solution request template.
- Integration Developers define the integration scope from a technical perspective by processing an interface request. As part of the interface request the integration developer walks through a questionnaire, which is used to capture the technical requirements of a specific integration scenario. Once done, the integration developer gets a proposal of the integration technologies with the best fit to the specified requirements. Integration developers can accept the proposal or deviate from the proposed technology. This decision is documented in the tool.
Open Questions Regarding Integration Scenarios
When migrating to an Integration Suite, similar questions often arise:
- Which technologies are used for integrating a specific application?
- Which integration use case patterns are supported per integration technology?
- Which integration patterns are being used at all?
Integration Assessment helps you to get insights into your integration landscape. While processing the interface requests with this tool, the related information about integration technologies used, and so on, is being captured and visualized in Integration Assessment.
You can see, for instance, which technologies are used for integrating a specific application or which integration use case patterns are supported per integration technology and more.
