Finding the Flaws of the Whole, Not Just the Flaws of the Parts

The Visible and the Invisible in SAP
It would seem like the last thing we need in SAP systems is more metrics. Automated solutions that investigate, monitor and track ERP systems are common, so why are major corporations increasingly employing automated metrics for SAP systems?

Like all systems that span the enterprise, SAP systems suffer from the "six blind men and the elephant" problem - each man is able to envision his own part of the elephant, but putting together a picture of the whole animal is a problem. It is this "whole is greater than the sum of its parts" view that SAP developers need to get their arms around.

In what has become an all too frequent post-customization scenario, SAP developers are called to fix a transaction performance problem. Usually they find that availability is great, there's nothing wrong with the code - no odd changes - but somehow latency is in the tank. So what's wrong?

Some recent research on this very issue looked at 30 customer installs at large installations at Fortune 1000 companies with a lot of customization. The study looked closely at how database calls are handled in these installations.

The result was startling - 80 percent of the database interactions were being improperly handled. Large packet sizes, too much chatter, improper error handling, loops in queries and lapses in connection handling were prevalent. These problems caused periodic and significant business disruption. As we know, intermittent problems are the hardest to trace and fix because if you can't replicate it, you can't see what to fix - it's the kind of problem that traps you in the office on a Sunday until 3 a.m.

How does this kind of thing end up happening with such alarming frequency? After all, no ABAP developer worth his or her salt would ever do such things and no database admin would be caught dead writing inefficient queries. It must be those darn six blind men!
The blind men are the symptom caused by three types of complexity:

1.Technological Complexity: A typical SAP install has a large number of interconnected, customized components, with dependencies spanning from the GUI to the database layer. Business transactions cut across applications, functional roles within IT, business processes and business divisions. No single developer or even team of developers can comprehend the system end to end. Changes have ripple effects that are difficult to predict and control. None of these is by itself a bad thing, but together they make it very hard to get a sense of how the system is working as a whole to accomplish its critical business tasks.
2.Process Complexity: Because the system crosses organizational boundaries within and outside IT, it runs into different processes within these groups. Each process demands a unique skill set for the people involved, and has its own timeframe, maturity level, inputs and outputs. It is inevitable that when seen as one large "super-process," a lot falls through the cracks because no one person or team has the complete end-to-end view.
3.Governance Complexity: When you add organizational and reporting structures to the process complexity layer, you get governance complexity. This is about the hierarchies of authority and influence that manipulate the processes. The result is a highly scrutinized business-critical system that outruns technology, process, and governance boundaries. In such situations, one team's priority may not be another's, resulting in an inability to see the end-to-end view.
As we see in the next section, this fragmented view of the systems causes all the typical problems that beset ERP systems.

Structural Visibility of the Whole System
Inability to capture the end-to-end view leads to the usual problems people cite with ERP systems - escalating maintenance costs (over and above the 18% license cost) and nagging performance and stability problems. The root causes of these problems are hard to discern, but they have become almost clichéd and yawn inducing in their recurrence...

Source: http://sap.sys-con.com