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One of the things I love about the BPM approach is its amazing ability to synch business and IT implementation. No where does this show up more clearly than when applying BPM to what are commonly considered IT processes in order to involve the business.
As I've pointed out in my blogs before, Enterprise Information Management (EIM) is one such area. In companies with a less mature approach to managing their information and data, data quality issues are considered an "IT problem", and IT is left to figure out how to mitigate these issues - usually with varying degrees of success. But when BPM is leveraged to orchestrate data quality and governance into a company's business processes, the whole process works much more seamlessly and efficiently.
Recently, I came across such a story here at SAP, where our IT group is facilitating integration of some recently acquired companies. The team has leveraged our own technologies, SAP NetWeaver BPM and SAP BusinessObjects Data Services, to create a data cleansing, migration, and governance process. This had the effect of transforming an IT centric process into an evolving best practice that engages IT data analysts and LOB managers in accepting new customer data as they are migrated into SAP's systems.
Figure 1: System Architecture of SAP's BPM-based data migration process
Listen to my latest podcast as I interview Oktavian Wagner of SAP IT's Merger and Acquisition Business Process and Application Migration team as he describes the solution they built.
The technical details of this story are also described in the forthcoming book, "Real World BPM in an SAP Environment" from SAP Press, available this fall.
Postcast Summary
Here is a short summary of the questions that I ask Oktavian in this podcast:0:00 Introductions
0:40 What role does your team play in the integration of acquired companies?
1:15 What kinds of things does your team have to accomplish when acquiring a company?
1:52 Is your team is using SAP NetWeaver BPM and SAP BusinessObjects Data Services to enable this post merger data migration?
2:35 What is SAP trying to achieve with this project?
3:29 Why is data quality such an issue for SAP when acquiring companies?
4:05 Describe the solution your team has built at a high level.
5:02 Tell us how you are using SAP BusinessObjects Data Services.
6:11 Give us a little more detail about how SAP NetWeaver BPM and SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment fit into this solution.
6:58 In what ways is SAP NetWeaver Business Rules Management used in this solution?
8:30 Tell us about the user experience that was built to go with this new automated process.
9:30 Tell us about how your team worked with SAP Value prototyping to get your project built.
