Best Practices
I’m creating a new blog series about best practices in the world of SAP Integration, so I can deliver a presentation at the 2015 SAP TechEd conference in Las Vegas.
You can see the starting post here:
http://picourse.com/teched-presentation-on-best-practices-in-sap-integration/
Today’s post focuses on the reasons behind the concept of best practices. The concept exists for a reason, after all.
So, why do we need best practices?
Because customers do not want to reinvent the wheel. They need a standard, solid structure – a model that is built to last. If it works for other people, customers are ready to accept a set of purportedly effective procedures; this is true in regards to most businesses. Customers also wish to upgrade smoothly, without any disturbances in the process.
When you are working on a project (e.g. you are developing something), you need to commit a large amount of resources to it. You need to develop your project, maintain it, and offer support as well. If you happen to mess up one of these three steps, you might end up putting a lot of extra work into the project.
Working within the SAP framework, and avoiding dead ends are crucial steps. Whenever you see SAP staff developing something, then switching their perspectives to other areas, you might want to think twice, and decide not to invest in those fabricated technologies.
For example, the SAP Business Connector was a great product in its heyday – it had a lot of interesting features and it was free for existing SAP customers (as far as I remember); however, all the time, consulting, and development put into it was worthless in the end, as no easy upgrade path was available.
Doing any kind of integration can be difficult because there is a large architecture that you need to have in place. There are many frameworks, techniques, and tools you need to use in order to ultimately render the integration useful.
We certainly yearn for proven solutions. We want to see other people successfully go through every step of these solutions, without us necessarily dealing with them. In this fast-paced world, we want solutions made available to us at our earliest convenience.
If you have anything else to share on the topic of best practices, do not hesitate to write a comment! Why do you think professionals in every field want to have a set of universally accepted best practices?
