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Introduction
As part of every business transformation journey, customers are moving towards cloud systems. They need to act with agility and bring innovation into the business, while coping with increasing business demands and expectations. One of the constant questions that customers want addressed is how cloud can be used efficiently as an enabler of Innovation and agility to transform.
The SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) is a comprehensive suite of tools, services, and technologies provided by SAP to enable businesses to build, extend, and integrate their applications and processes. It serves as a foundation for digital transformation and helps organizations to leverage their data, connect their systems, and innovate their business processes.
SAP Business Technology Platform is the platform for SAP :
- Harmonized technology foundation in order to build and run SAP Cloud Applications
- Utilize common platform services across the full SAP portfolio, enabling consistent “suite qualities” across all SAP applications.
- To manage the data in a harmonized way to successfully achieve digital transformation
- Innovation engine for SAP Cloud Applications by embedding latest intelligent technologies
SAP Business Technology Platform is the platform for our Customers and partners:
- Customize SAP solutions, build extensions or derive insights out of their processes
- Develop, integrate and run complementary solutions and content
- Leverage modern data and analytics platform to become Data driven organization
- Easy, fast access to applications and content from the SAP ecosystem
See below how SAP BTP is positioned along with SAP Applications
Role of SAP Business Technology Platform
Not only is SAP building new applications on SAP BTP, but in addition its robust partner ecosystem has also built numerous applications on SAP BTP. More than 16000 customers have been using SAP BTP as their platform of choice.
SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) plays a pivotal role in bringing technology innovation to SAP Applications and improving business processes. Below are some of the key factors and how it brings value to the innovation and improvement to business processes.
- Respond to changing market dynamics with sustainable business decisions
- Leverage fifty years of deep industry and Line of Business (LoB) business process expertise embedded within the platform
- Gain limitless potential for improving business outcomes with a connected, integrated data landscape
- Stay future-ready by connecting data, decision-making, and organizational value to automate your critical business processes
- Establish governance across the entire value chain with confidence through real-time, complete views of all your data, no matter where it resides
- Stay ahead of the competition by easily customizing solutions infused with artificial intelligence, Generative AI and automation
- Deliver business value quickly and avoid building applications from scratch with ready-built, plug-and-play business content and no-code tools
Below diagram illustrates the key capabilities of SAP Business Technology Platform :
Is BTP a “Change Agent” or “Scale Agent” ?
SAP BTP can be a “Change Agent” or a “Scale Agent” depending upon your requirements. For example SAP BTP can be a “Change Agent” if you are currently in the initial stages of your journey with SAP BTP OR it can be a “Scale Agent” if you are currently in the scaling stages of your journey.
Whether you are starting your journey or scaling, the key question we want to address in this article is how to bring agility and the best practices in the use of SAP BTP.
You need a “niche team” which understands the cloud world, latest technologies like AI & Gen AI, Automation, data and insights and related methodologies. For example, a simple topic like application development in the cloud paradigm will follow an agile development methodology as opposed to the traditional development methodology. This may take long cycles in trying out a new idea or requirement from business, while a prototype is all that is required to validate and this can be achieved in weeks if not days.
Now the question is how do you assemble this “niche team” with a mindset of “CLOUD FIRST”, “AGILE” and “ADAPTABLE”, what kind of organizational structure is required and what kind of skillset they should possess, to be able to respond to businesses quickly.
Introducing the concept of “Center of Excellence” (CoE) here which differs from the typical IT project team. BTP CoE is typically established to provide expertise, guidance, and best practices. It aims to drive innovation, standardization, and knowledge sharing across an organization.
How to enable it
By setting up a SAP BTP CoE which is a dedicated team that focuses on identifying projects that can be built on SAP BTP. This is otherwise either built on core application itself or on any other platform.
Let us look at the main objectives of the BTP CoE :
1. Position BTP: BTP CoE’s key objective is to identify where BTP can be positioned to make a business impact through innovation and also to improve the existing business process so the organization can gain a competitive advantage and secure continued success. BTP COE also brings the innovation mind-set into the organization and later can become a “Scale Agent” from “Change Agent”.
2. Drive innovation: The CoE promotes the use of SAP BTP to drive innovation and digital transformation within the organization. It helps identify and evaluate new technologies and solutions, and assists in developing business cases for their adoption.
3. Share knowledge and best practices: The CoE serves as a knowledge hub, sharing best practices, lessons learned, and success stories related to SAP BTP. It provides guidance on architecture, design patterns, and development methodologies to ensure consistency and quality across projects.
4. Provide ongoing support: The CoE offers ongoing support to users of SAP BTP solutions, addressing issues, answering questions, and providing guidance on how to leverage the platform effectively. It also helps in troubleshooting and resolving technical problems.
5. Enable successful implementation: The CoE provides guidance and support to ensure that SAP BTP solutions are implemented effectively and efficiently within the organization. This includes defining implementation strategies, providing technical expertise, and offering training and support to project teams
The BTP COE maturity consists of three stages, The initial setup will follow the “Pioneer” where there will be a skeletal minimalistic team that identifies the use cases from the business unit, and builds this out in BTP to showcase it to the business unit.
Once the first use case goes live, the BTP COE team is then on the journey to the “Enabler” which does multiple projects and potentially becomes a distributed model.
The third stage is a “Exemplar” where SAP BTP is used in every LoB which can be called Citizen model. The Below Diagram illustrates the 3 stages of COE organization maturity model mentioned.
A typical journey map of customer BTP CoE setup will include introduction to the program, identification of the role of BTP and the common usage patterns, initial organization structure, skills required, gap identification and solutions to bridge those gaps through learning map and lastly, the path to build the first project on BTP and define go-live. Along the way, preparation for the certification is ongoing as well.
Conclusion
In this part 1 blog we have established the role of SAP BTP and how it brings innovation and transformation in customer’s SAP Application landscape. We also saw how SAP BTP brings value in driving the innovation and transformation objective.
The choice of whether SAP BTP can be used as a “Change Agent” vs “Scale Agent”, depends largely on understanding the usage respective to your environment. In the last section, it is discussed why a BTP COE team is important, what objectives can be achieved with such a team and the evolution of the BTP COE team.
In the subsequent blogs we will delve into details of the BTP COE program, common archetypes, organization models, service catalog, etc. Stay tuned! If you are interested in setting up a BTP COE team in your organization, please reach out to either your account team OR write to cbcoe@sap.com .
