Laying an Enterprise Information Management Foundation for SAP Migration and/or Modernization
In a recent survey, 73 percent of respondents with current SAP instances indicated plans to deploy SAP S/4HANA.
Leaders will have to assess whether an effective underlying enterprise information management foundation is in place to leverage strategic value out of SAP investments across on-prem and cloud enterprise infrastructures.
By establishing a dedicated information management foundation, critical applications have a single point from which to mine data needed to perform their functions and eliminates the requirement for a complex web of application-to-application interfaces.
Jonathan Beardsley, OpenText
Large organizations that have deployed SAP to underpin their most strategic operations are in the process of evaluating how this critical enterprise application will support accelerated technology modernization and business transformation initiatives.
With the expiration date for support for ECC 6.0 now set for 2027, many executives have elected to pull the trigger on moving to S/4HANA, according to analysts at IDC. In a recent survey, 73 percent of respondents with current SAP instances indicated plans to deploy SAP S/4HANA. A significant portion (43 percent) of those surveyed plan to consolidate several ERP systems into one.
The survey leaves room for more than a quarter (27 percent) of current SAP customers are either undecided S/4HANA or plan to stay the course with current deployments for the time being. Whatever direction is pursued, leaders will have to assess whether an effective underlying enterprise information management foundation is in place to leverage strategic value out of SAP investments across on-prem and cloud enterprise infrastructures.
To explore how organizations can lay enterprise information management foundations for SAP migration and modernization, BizTechReports caught up with Yana Rozenfeld and Jonathan Beardsley from OpenText.
Here is what they had to say:
As organizations explore their options for SAP -- in the context of the looming end-of-support for ECC 6.0 -- executives around the virtual roundtable reflected a wide range of attitudes -- from excitement to frustration -- about the options for moving forward.
For virtually all organizations in the room, SAP has played a critical role in supporting mission-critical operations for years -- and often decades. Many executives report that they have had multiple instances of SAP -- in some cases dozens -- that have accumulated over the years as the result of organic growth across regions, as well as through mergers and acquisitions.
Many are split on how rapidly to adopt native-cloud versions of SAP and S/4HANA.
For those who were reticent to modernize or embrace SAP in the cloud, the issues most frequently cited revolved around the impact of cloud migrations on highly customized SAP instances supporting established business processes that were unlikely to change over the foreseeable future. Executives from this category indicate that they receive serious pushback from line-of-business executives who are not interested in having their go-to-market activities disrupted by technology modernization initiatives that were not directly tied to generating current business value. That said, the retirement of ECC is inevitably driving changes that are likely to affect the business.
Organizations that have announced aggressive and comprehensive business transformation initiatives appear open to the idea of migrating rapidly toward cloud -- and even SaaS -- versions of SAP offerings. This could be mainly because current critical operations are under review for significant changes in response to shifts in the market. These executives express a sense of urgency in adopting more agile -- and standardized -- environments to support new more flexible workflows.
Both communities, however, share a common point of frustration: How to integrate adjacent enterprise applications into their evolving SAP environment.
The emergence of SaaS-based enterprise applications -- like Salesforce for CRM or Workday for HR -- and other critical technologies have introduced new siloes of critical data that have been difficult to integrate. As Yana from OpenText pointed out: “None of these systems share information very well.” This is a major problem for organizations that are striving to improve their data-driven decision-making capabilities. “That is why we are seeing a trend toward developing information platforms that allow enterprises to collaborate across these applications in real-time,” she said.
According to Jonathan from OpenText, shifts in the SAP environment -- whether they are embraced rapidly or over time -- will require a comprehensive review of how enterprise systems are architected. “At the core of the architecture,” he suggested, “Should be a robust information layer that enables data integration across all critical applications,” he said.
By establishing a dedicated information management foundation, critical applications have a single point from which to mine data needed to perform their functions. It eliminates the requirement for a complex web of application-to-application interfaces. “If the information is available to everybody, you solve half the problem. That is the promise offered by an extended enterprise content management strategy,” says Jonathan.
The information layer also offers organizations an opportunity to optimize the management of unstructured data, which often dwarfs structured data in terms of both volume and complexity. “I strongly recommend that decision-makers dedicate time to focusing on what happens to unstructured information as part of their transformation. Because if you leave unstructured data behind, it's a big pile of information that you'll need to migrate and drag along afterward when it becomes a far more expensive problem statement to address,” said Yana.
For more information about BizTechReport podcast interviews, please contact Melissa Fisher at MFisher@BizTechReports.com.