Introduction
Many customers have the challenge of tackling a business problem with new BTP services of which they have little to no experience. In this blog post it will be shown how to combine the Discovery Center with its missions with an Enterprise Architecture Roadmap to accelerate the adoption of the SAP Business Technology Platform.
Enterprise Architecture Roadmap
It is important to understand what we in the AppHaus define as an Enterprise Architecture Roadmap and how we are using this artifact in our customer projects. The EA Roadmap is one of the first artifacts that is developed during an AppHaus project and is constantly updated as the project progresses. The roadmap is used to visualize the different actions and steps that need to be done to realize the solution at customer side and puts them in a logical and chronological order. In the AppHaus we define so called work packages which guide the customer or the implementation team in the right direction to complete the required steps. Creating such work packages can be time consuming, especially for newer solutions for which there is not much content like best practices.
SAP Business Technology Platform
The SAP Business Technology Platform (short: SAP BTP) is a platform combining different services from different domains. Including data and analytics, artificial intelligence, application development, automation, and integration
To find more information about the SAP BTP check out the product page, the Discovery Center or our community blog posts about SAP BTP.
Discovery Center and its Missions
The Discovery Center is a place where you can find best practices to solve different business problems and learn technical approaches. The main components of the Discovery Center are so called missions. A mission can be described as a content package which helps customers or implementation teams to implement a use case (business or technical). The content typical contains architectural guidance, code snippets, design proposals and so on.
Combining the Discovery Center with the Roadmap
As mentioned before the creation of work packages can be a time-consuming task. This is where the missions of the Discovery Center come in. Often a Discovery Center mission or parts of it can be used as such a work package. In practice this saves a lot of time, as you are just reusing existing content instead of creating it on your own. Also, the content is often of higher quality, as the missions are created by experts in the respective domain. So called mission owners can assist if there are questions regarding anything in the context of the mission including business value or technical feasibility.
Example project with work products.
In this example we are looking at a company which wants to make the move to S/4HANA. In the context of this, the company also wants to improve the productivity in different areas by implementing BTP services.
In the early stage of the explore phase of the Human-Centered-Approach-to-Innovation it was discovered, that the area of Invoice Handling is currently not efficient, as there is much manual effort in getting the information from the invoices into the system and in answering recurrent customer questions.
After some workshops it was decided that the invoice handling should be automated to a large degree. It was found out that the recurrent customer questions could be handled by a chatbot in an efficient way.
The three missions used are:
- Use SAP Fiori Custom Code Migration App to Analyze Your ABAP Custom Code for SAP S/4HANA Readiness
- Process and approve your invoices with SAP Process Automation
- Create exceptional digital customer experience with Conversational AI
The Enterprise Architect involved in the project created an Enterprise Architecture Roadmap using the AppHaus architecture thinking toolkit like seen here:
Of course, this roadmap is more like a minimalistic example and in a real project there would be many more steps. (Upgrade to S4/HANA might even get an own roadmap)
As you can see, three different Discovery Center missions were used in the architecture roadmap in different phases and therefore saving time in creating the content packages.
Conclusion
In conclusion Discovery Center missions can be seamlessly included in the architecture roadmap to increase quality and efficiency of Human-Centered-Approach-To-Innovation projects.
