"My company is running a complicate business process which is costing us a lot of resource, can ESA help? Which parts of my process should be deployed as services?" If you are pondering this kind of questions, you know that discovering the right enterprise services is an art. Well, hopefully not anymore - to address exactly that kind of questions, SAP has released a set of 16 indicators for discovering enterprise services!
You may have noticed that a white paper "Enterprise Services Design Guide" was released yesterday (October 18, 2005)in SDN. Have you read it? If not, have a look. The paper might be too shallow for those who are savvy in ESA, go ahead and skip whatever you already know, but I bet there is something new there. Look at the section "Discovery and Design of Enterprise Services: A partitioned Approach", deep in it, you will find the 16 indicators for discovering enterprise services, first time released by SAP.
It's kind of unfortunate that the paper, constrained by its scope and length, can not dive into details for each of the indicators and they might easily escape a reader's attention. But I urge you to take notes on these indicators, you will find them helpful.
The indicators are only an iceberg of a more comprehensive yet pragmatic methodology developed by my colleagues in the team lead by Kaj van de Loo. The methodology has been proven to be very pragmatic and useful. See the result yourself - SAP has actually applied this methodology in identifying the 500 services in its Enterprise Services Inventory which is part of the NetWeaver Business Process Platform. You can gain access to the inventory via the ESA Preview System.
I hope more details of the services discovering methodology will be made available via SDN, as part of ESA adoption program.
Let's stay tuned. If you don't see more coming, ask for it.
