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What is an Tech Radar
The Tech Radar is a tool to inspire and support Engineering teams to pick the best technologies for new projects; it provides a platform to share knowledge and experience in technologies, to reflect on technology decisions and continuously evolve our technology landscape. Based on the pioneering work of ThoughtWorks, a Tech Radar sets out the changes in technologies that are interesting in software development — changes that your engineering teams should pay attention to and use in their projects.
This article will talk about what it is, how we it could be used for the SAP Business Technology Platform , and why your company should have one.
Content of an SAP BTP Tech Radar
In many implementations of a Tech Radar, programming languages, technologies, tools, infrastructure services and other topics relating to the development and operations of IT solutions are discussed. Techniques, frameworks and approaches to modern software development are also important.
There is an outstanding catalog of services, missions and reference architectures for SAP BTP in the SAP SAP Discovery Center. However, this is not aligned and evaluated to the specific requirements of your company. Important criteria for the selection of services can be, for example, the company's own knowledge, security requirements or other solutions that are already in use. It is therefore important to evaluate these and use them to create, communicate and implement your own SAP BTP Tech Radar.
How to build Your SAP BTP Tech Radar
A single person or a central team should not be the only responsible one for setting up your own tech radar. Rather, it is a collaborative task that experts from different teams and areas of a company should perform together. This includes not only developers from different teams, but also IT administrators, security-, business experts and architects.
This group should meet regularly to review evaluations and, if necessary, add new entries and delete those that are no longer required. The assessment made in this way should not be seen as an evaluation of individual SAP BTP solutions, but rather as a classification for your own company.
Before setting up a radar, you should first consider which areas you want to record. The following categories could be an idea for the BTP:
- BTP Development & Tools with all services and tools required for development
- BTP Environments & Techniques to evaluate the various runtime environments, cloud providers and techniques for development and operation
- BTP PaaS Services for classification of the current 92 BTP platform services
- BTP SaaS Services as a category for all SaaS solutions relating to the SAP Intelligent Enterprise, such as SAP Order Management foundation or SAP Sales Cloud
The rings for the evaluation - these ones could be the following:
- Hold for things that should no longer be used in new projects
- Incubating for solutions that may be interesting for innovative solutions or special requirements, but with which the teams have not yet gained much experience
- Emerging for services that have already been successfully used in development and operation, but where some elements may still be missing to make them completely enterprise ready
- Mature for things that have been tried and tested several times and are stable in operations, so that they can be used as to-go solutions for new projects
Reasons to build Your own Tech Radar
There are many reasons to carry out your own evaluation and classification of services for your company. These can be economic, legal reasons or based on the knowledge of your teams. Instead of a "centrally prescribed" list, it is a good idea to create and elaborate it together through a collaborative process. On the one hand, this usually improves the content, increases acceptance and on the other hand can be used by agile and independent teams as a starting and reference point for the realization of new projects. By feeding back the experiences from the teams, the list an be further developed by a team of architects
Benefits of LeanIX for your SAP BTP Tech Radar
A number of services used are typically already recorded in LeanIX or can be quickly added via the SaaS catalog, what can save time. The implementation in LeanIX is very simple thanks to a report available in the store. A single point of truth makes it very easy to implement and discoverable for your team members. The most important thing, however, is that this can greatly promote usage, acceptance and transparency by linking the entries to your application, processes and capabilities as well as the SAP BTP Sub Accounts and spaces where the services are used. Manual maintenance in Office solutions or a wiki is often quite time-consuming and quickly generates redundant and outdated information.
Realization in LeanIX
After adding the Tech Radar report and creating the tag group in the admin area, you can directly start evaluating the SAP BTP service. Simply select the values in the two tag groups for the category and the ring.
You can then check the radar directly under the reports and as well check further details on the entry and also see when the evaluation was made.
Other use cases
Once you have stored and evaluated the services in LeanIX, you can easily assign them to SAP BTP Sub Accounts (Platform Fact Sheet in LeanIX) and applications and thus easily receive further informations in reports (will be described in a further blog). By maintaining your own or SAP based lifecycle information, you can also identify areas of action for you IT landscape.
In order to get the full power out of your SAP BTP, it is important to follow a certain level of governance and guidelines. Very good starting points for that could be the SAP BTP Guidance Framework or the New SAP Activate Roadmap for SAP Business Technology Platform.
Your ideas
- What are your thoughts on this?
- How do you see possible uses?
- Does having your own SAP BTP Tech Radar make sense? What are the correct categories?
- Who has already implemented their own Tech Radar in the SAP area and what are your experiences with it?
Content for Your SAP BTP Tech Radar
Tobias Hoffmann published a version of an SAP development tech radar, that lists te SAP technologies and their usage recommendation. Thus version is maintained by Tobias Hofmann. The idea is to continuously improve the tech radar by adding, removing and adjusting the listed technologies. The latest version of the tech radar will be published every quarter. But as discussed earlier it is very important to build your own version of your Tech Radar.
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