PUBLIC

Customer Center of Expertise from SAP

Strategy, Governance and Organization

Overview and Insights Document for Customer Centers of Expertise

May 2023
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................................................... 3

INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................................... 3

Overview: Customer COE Management Framework / Pyramid .................................................................. 3

CUSTOMER COE STRATEGY ......................................................................................................................... 5

The importance of a Customer COE Strategy ............................................................................................. 5

How to develop a clear Customer COE Strategy ......................................................................................... 5

SAP ARCHITECTURE & INNOVATION ........................................................................................................... 6

Why is a well-structured SAP Architecture increasingly important? ............................................................ 6

How can the Customer COE support the company’s IT Organization in the context of Architecture
Management and Integration? ..................................................................................................................... 7
How can the Customer COE drive continuous Innovation? ......................................................................... 7

CUSTOMER COE GOVERNANCE .................................................................................................................. 7

The importance of Customer COE Governance .......................................................................................... 7

Key topics and capabilities of Customer COE Governance (Excerpt) ......................................................... 7

CUSTOMER COE ORGANIZATION .............................................................................................................. 10

Basic Concepts of IT Organizations ........................................................................................................... 10

SAP as Distributed or Centralized Approach ............................................................................................. 12
Future Customer COE Organization – How Customer COEs can adapt to the cloud ............................... 12

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ABSTRACT

There is a consensus among practitioners that the lack of alignment between business and IT strategies is
one of the main reasons why companies fail to realize the full potential for their IT investments. Although it
may seem trivial, business and IT alignment remain one of the key challenges organizations worldwide are
faced with. To support SAP customers to bridge the gap between business management and their IT
department, SAP provides services designed to help companies build a Customer Center of Expertise
(Customer COE). Following a proven IT methodology, SAP makes use of the Customer COE Management
framework which was developed during hundreds of customer engagements and can serve as a guide for the
establishment of your own Customer COE. The main purpose of this paper is to provide you a holistic overview
of the Customer COE Management framework by elaborating the interdependencies between the different
layers, as well as giving you insights into the areas Customer COE Strategy, SAP Architecture and Innovation,
Customer COE Governance and Organization. With the help of this whitepaper, you’ll gain a better
understanding of the initial parameters required for the establishment of a successful Customer COE.

INTRODUCTION

Overview: Customer COE Management Framework / Pyramid

Why do companies still struggle to align their business and IT departments?

Misalignment between an organization’s IT and the business side usually emerges from the dynamics and
complexities of general business practices. While IT departments often don’t have a clear understanding of
what is important to the business, leadership might not understand the value of IT investment. Plus, IT
departments are quite often managed as isolated or even outsourced units, which results in IT decisions made
separately from the business side.

What is Business-IT alignment and why is it important?

Business-IT alignment reflects the degree to which an organization’s IT strategy, organization and
infrastructure supports and is supported by the business organization. Since IT investment can significantly
improve business performance, achieving business-IT alignment is one of the most important requirements
that convert IT-driven value into business performance. Hence, strategically aligned businesses can improve
organizational agility as well as operational efficiencies. In fact, business-IT alignment can lead to faster
response times and more efficient processes. Finally, business-IT alignment helps the company to meet the
IT demands more consistently and efficiently and to increase the agility of the business in order to be able to
quickly react to changing market trends.

Consequently, each organization requires a dedicated team that has the necessary expertise to manage
knowledge and activities related to the company’s IT solutions. In order to help our customers, achieve
business-IT alignment through a joint unit within the organization, SAP offers services that empower customers
to build a Customer Center of Expertise (Customer COE):

The Customer COE is defined as a core team of experts that comprises deep SAP skills and
knowledge and that generates tangible business value through sustainable and strong collaboration
with the lines of business. It is the driver for continuous success to maximize the return on investment.

Hence, the main objective of a Customer COE is to increase business value and efficiency by creating a link
between the business, SAP Solutions and the IT department. Besides enabling business process innovation
and a better business-IT alignment, a Customer COE can help you to achieve IT Service and cost excellence
by improving customer satisfaction and reducing total cost of ownership (TCO).

In order to give customers guidance on how to establish a Customer COE, SAP makes use of a proven IT
Management framework (Figure 1) that depicts the most relevant aspects of a company’s IT Organization:
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Customer Center of Expertise – Strategy, Governance and Organization
Customer COE Strategy, SAP Architecture and Innovation, Customer COE Organization and Governance,
processes and functions, tools and standards, people and skills.

While the Customer COE Strategy describes how business and IT strategies are aligned through the Customer
COE to generate tangible business value, the layer SAP Architecture and Innovation refers to how the
Customer COE enables integration between different applications and how it drives continuous innovation.
Customer COE Governance provides the necessary structure for aligning business and IT strategies.
Processes and functions describe how the Customer COE operational services are designed and delivered to
drive efficiencies. The layer tools and standards describe how productivity tools can be leveraged to improve
the delivery Management of the Customer COE. Finally, the people and skills dimension refers to how the
overall Customer COE organization is designed and how the roles, skills and staff are aligned to meet business
objectives.
For maximizing benefits for Business and IT, it is important to establish and manage all Customer COE
Management layers holistically as competencies are heavily linked to each other.

Figure 1: Customer COE Management Framework

In order to lay the foundation for a Customer COE to become an innovative enabler for your business,
Customer COEs should be aligned with SAP Activate. SAP Activate is a flexible methodology based
on pre-configured SAP best practices, used to accelerate the implementation of SAP Cloud Solutions
and SAP S/4HANA Cloud and to enable continuous adoption of innovations throughout the entire
project lifecycle. Find further information concerning the SAP Activate methodology on this overview
page the SAP Activate Roadmap Viewer (valid S-user or Universal ID required).

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Customer Center of Expertise – Strategy, Governance and Organization
Before diving into each of the Management layers separately, we clarify their importance along the Customer
COE Lifetime Journey (Figure 2). From an SAP best-practice perspective, formulating a Customer COE
strategy as well as driving organization and governance are the essence for a successful Customer COE and
therefore positioned as the “Foundation” of a Customer COE. Nevertheless, all three pillars need to be
continuously reviewed and improved during all stages of the Lifetime journey of a Customer COE.

Figure 2: Customer COE - Lifetime Journey for Continuous Success

CUSTOMER COE STRATEGY

The importance of a Customer COE Strategy

The importance of having an IT strategy has been amplified over the past few years as organizations are faced
with rapidly changing technologies and digital transformation challenges which require organizations to have
an effective strategy to follow. Thus, with the increasing interconnection and complexity in modern day
business, having an IT strategy has become a necessity for survival. Consequently, organizations need a well-
designed and proactive IT strategy to leverage the power of IT and take advantage of the synergies between
their business processes.

The Customer COE has the purpose to manage all SAP related activities as a central hub across business
side and IT, hence, we recommend a dedicated Customer COE Strategy definition which is primarily derived
from your existing Strategy. Many customers are planning an SAP footprint across multiple organizations and
are building a dedicated team to implement the SAP Solution. As the solution to be implemented typically
differs from existing solutions, we recommend our customers to define an own strategy, identity and clear
guidelines for the SAP team. Consequently, having a clearly defined Customer COE Strategy will help you
streamline your SAP related capabilities to meet your business needs.

How to develop a clear Customer COE Strategy

A Customer COE Strategy should primarily describe how business and IT strategies meet business needs and
how the Customer COE generates tangible business value and efficiency. But what are the necessary steps
and actions to define the right Customer COE Strategy? A strategy primarily requires the formulation of a vision
and a mission statement.
The Vision has the purpose to show the fundamental direction for the Customer COE and to define the aspired
state and the main objectives. A clear Customer COE Vision statement creates a common understanding in
your company about where the organization wants to go and consequently motivates employees to take action
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Customer Center of Expertise – Strategy, Governance and Organization
in the right direction in a lasting manner. It also coordinates the actions of many people and balances conflicting
interests of different stakeholders. To put it in a nutshell, the Vision statement should describe the future state
of the Customer COE in terms of fundamental objectives and strategic direction.
While the Vision statement should make clear what the Customer COE wants to be, the Mission statement
should specify why the Customer COE exists. It defines the fundamental purpose of the Customer COE and
what it does to achieve its Vision. Having a clear Mission statement equally leads to more employee motivation,
provides a clear guidance for the daily work and supports jointly shared values within the staff.

Example for Customer COE Strategy formulation │Logistics Industry

Customer COE Vision: “We translate the necessary business requirements into IT capabilities and
assure that our organization maintains its position as world leader in the logistics industry.”
Customer COE Mission: “We are experts on business processes, applications and solutions driving
innovation and standardization. With our knowledge and expertise, we harmonize and improve efficient
solutions and enable the business to develop new innovations in order to maintain our competitive
advantage.”

Further required elements are Customer COE Objectives, Activities and Guidelines. Objectives are derived
from the Customer COE Vision, Mission, Business goals and the IT strategy. Customer COE Activities are the
conclusion of the IT objectives and result in specific activities. Based on these activities, strategic initiatives
and IT measures with different priorities can be formulated. At the end, an IT/SAP Roadmap is the strategic
outcome. It includes the above Customer COE Objectives and Activities and sometimes also additional single
IT Strategies e.g. SAP Application/Template Strategy, Data/Information Strategy, Infrastructure Strategy.

SAP ARCHITECTURE & INNOVATION

SAP recently introduced an additional layer to the Customer COE Management Framework SAP Architecture
& Innovation to highlight the Customer COE’s role in positioning SAP Architecture management and Innovation
Management as continuous processes in the organization.

Why is a well-structured SAP Architecture increasingly important?

As cloud-based solutions are proliferating and many IT environments are becoming hybrid, customers require
integration between components and applications that are split across SAP on-premise and cloud
environments as well as across SAP and third-party applications. Hence, to avoid duplication in master data,
disconnected silos and an inconsistent user experience due to a lack of integration between different
applications, ensuring that all SAP applications, data and processes are well-connected and seamlessly
integrated becomes a top priority for any customer. In addition, the relevance of security and cybersecurity for
IT infrastructure has increased tremendously in the last years.
Consequently, having a clear integration strategy and road map guiding the development of the SAP
architecture towards efficiency and flexibility is essential for any customer organization. To guide our
customers on this journey, SAP is constantly broadening its integration suite offering. For more information
about SAP’s Integration Road Map in the Cloud, please check out SAP's Integration road map document and
the Integration Architecture Guide for Cloud and Hybrid Landscapes.
Besides, organizations should ensure that decisions about key design aspects are in line with their
transformation strategy. Therefore, SAP recommends customers to consider the set-up of a Design Authority
board that reviews architecture designs with respect to consistency, dependencies to other domains and
adherence to the architecture guidelines. The Design Authority also evaluates possible design alternatives,
including roadmap discussions with SAP Product Management. If desired, the customer is supported with
Design Authority services by SAP Enterprise Architects and Design Advisors.

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How can the Customer COE support the company’s IT Organization in the context of Architecture
Management and Integration?

Most importantly, the Customer COE is expected to position SAP Architecture management as a continuous
process in the organization to best manage enterprise-wide transformations of SAP landscapes.
The Customer COE should act as an enabler for the execution of an organization’s integration strategy by
providing the necessary resources, such as staffing (enterprise and integration Architects, etc.) and training
possibilities.

How can the Customer COE drive continuous Innovation?

In order to stay on top of emerging technologies and innovations, enterprises need to encourage appropriate
levels of controlled innovation within their IT Organization and assure the full realization of benefits from
innovative activities.
Therefore, the Customer COE should maintain knowledge of latest innovation by keeping close connection to
experts from the SAP ecosystem (internal and external skills) and by providing the business with more
innovation services such as rapid prototyping utilizing design thinking workshops. A useful tool that makes it
easier for the Customer COE to find out about new SAP innovations that may help the business is SAP Road
Map Explorer. This self-service tool (available for free in the SAP Support Portal) simplifies the search for new
functionality SAP has delivered as well as innovations planned for the near future. This tool also helps to
ensure that both IT and the responsible business departments / business process managers clearly
understand the value and implications of SAP innovations including Features and Functions. Link to SAP Road
Map Explorer: http://roadmaps.sap.com.
But although new innovations provide tremendous opportunities for companies in the context of Digital
transformation, they also cause new challenges for the IT staff. Especially with SaaS, the demand for
operations-based skills is reduced, which requires an early transformation of the employees in both business
and IT towards more innovation-oriented skills. Thus, the Customer COE needs to ensure that the IT
employees are properly reskilled to perform new roles focused on business innovation.

CUSTOMER COE GOVERNANCE

The importance of Customer COE Governance

If the Customer COE Strategy provides the “why”, Customer COE Governance provides the “how”. Customer
COE Governance describes which guiding principles, best practices and methods are required to align
business and IT objectives. Thus, the main purpose of Customer COE Governance is setting out who is making
which decisions and who is going to be held accountable for results in your organization. Effective Customer
COE Governance is therefore principally an issue of alignment – getting the IT strategy aligned with the
organization’s business strategy and converging SAP-related investment with critical business priorities.

Key topics and capabilities of Customer COE Governance (Excerpt)

Here you find an exemplary list of some typical governance topics that a Customer COE needs to cover:

i. Decision making boards & bodies

ii. Roles and Responsibilities
iii. Governance of Business Process Ownership & IT Organization
iv. Key User Organization
v. External Stakeholder management

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i. Decision making boards & bodies

Establishing boards and bodies is required to keep control and take appropriate decisions, quickly and
effectively, to maximize Customer COE value for Business and IT. On the one hand, decision making bodies
should be implemented at all different organizational levels – at the strategic level, the tactical level and
ultimately the operational level. On the other hand, decision making boards & bodies are also required during
all different lifecycle phases – from Plan, over Build, and Run. The benefits of having different boards and
bodies across these two dimensions are clear: First, to receive information or to distribute information from
upper management to lower management or the other way around. Secondly, to undertake IT decisions on
the strategic level as well as on the operational level. The key benefit is to have visible decision-making
structures for all IT related topics.
A lot of SAP customers have already successfully established decision-making boards and bodies. As soon
as the SAP solution gets implemented in a customer’s organization, SAP can help you decide which bodies
should be specifically dedicated for SAP and for which bodies it makes sense to integrate SAP as Business
Solution.
In addition, the Customer COE needs to determine which major SAP-related IT decision areas exist and how
they should be distributed among the various roles. Major decision areas are for example the Customer COE
strategic direction, SAP infrastructure needs, SAP-related investment decisions and IT risk and compliance
management. Besides defining key IT decision areas, Customer COE governance also creates the institutional
structures for the decision areas.

ii. Roles and Responsibilities

Defining roles and responsibilities for your Customer COE and your Ecosystem is one of the essential tasks
each Customer COE needs to fulfill. One of the most important roles in each Customer COE is the role of a
Customer COE Manager, a key driver for continuous success in your Customer COE journey.
The Customer COE Manager is accountable and responsible for setting the Customer COE’s strategic
direction through continuous dialog with the lines of business, delivering its objectives and continuous success
based on the company’ strategy. Besides, other responsibilities include measuring the performance of the
Customer COE, as well as safeguarding its value realization and providing communication and governance of
SAP related topics in a company. Additionally, the Customer COE Manager is responsible for driving SAP
innovation and development efforts by maintaining an understanding of the competitive landscape and by
continuously reviewing the current field technology for replacement or upgrades. In other words, the Customer
COE Manager represents the interface to SAP who needs to have a strong understanding of IT methodologies
in order to be able to drive the business requirements of the future state.
Besides establishing the role of a Customer COE Manager, several other roles need to be assigned
successively. For instance, an information manager is required to consolidate all demands on the business
side. The counterpart of the information manager is the relationship manager in the IT Organization who is
responsible for the synergy fit check of all IT demands.

iii. Governance of Business Process Ownership & IT Organization

Unambiguousness in process ownership is one of the critical success factors of combining IT with business
processes. Often there is no explicit or implicit agreement of process ownership. Since the Customer COE is
a central hub to align business and IT roles, it plays a major role in defining business process roles and
providing clarity around the decision authority of the process owner role in your organization. The primary
focus is on the role of the business process owner who is not only involved at the time of SAP implementation
but who is also in charge of process efficiency, standardization and harmonization among all business
domains.
Moreover, the Customer COE needs to make sure that IT roles are aligned with the various business roles for
the main activities of the daily business between these two counterparts. For instance, both sides must be
aligned on the annual budget, future requirements, and business process improvements at least once or twice

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a year. On the business side, this task is usually done by the business sponsors who can either be board
members or department heads, whereas on the IT counterpart, usually the CIO or the IT director of the
organization fulfills this role. In addition, an organization must deal with in-year demands or small
enhancements which is typically covered by business demand managers (specific division heads) and
dedicated IT demand managers.

A useful tool that enables process owners, line of business managers but also technical system experts
to receive tailored insights into your company’s current business process performance is Process
Discovery for SAP S/4HANA Transformation (the evolution of SAP Business Scenario
Recommendations on Spotlight). It is a free of charge analysis application to get started with Business
Process Intelligence and SAP S/4HANA. You will receive an own analysis with data from your SAP
ERP system, business process insights and recommendations for SAP S/4HANA through a
personalized access to the Process Discovery cloud solution (online application) as well as an
executive summary. More information on how to request your own Process Discovery can be found at
www.sap.com/process-discovery.
For a detailed role description for Business Process Expert and Business Process Owner have a look at this
document.

iv. Key User Organization

SAP strongly recommends having a Key User Community established to ensure effective business operations.

The Key User model is based on the concept of bringing talented users into positions of leadership
for deploying SAP Solutions. The purpose of a Key User model is to act as first line of end user support,
to support training and testing activities and to strengthen communication between business and IT.
Key Users are expert users within the business. They have not only detailed knowledge about certain
business processes but also the necessary technical knowledge to support end users of the
organization and to suggest improvement possibilities to pain points in the process. Hence, the Key
User model provides faster support to end users, results in better IT asset utilization and lower total
cost of ownership.

Also, in cloud deployment models, where many operational IT roles are significantly reduced and the reskilling
of business and IT stakeholders becomes necessary, Key Users remain essential. They retain an important
role with great organizational culture significance. They lead the adoption of standardized and business
effective processes, interact directly with SAP to report incidents, train the user community and support a
business effective operation after go-live. Key Users also identify areas of business process optimization,
participate in validating and testing new business model transformation and optimized business processes and
support the roll-out of these business process/model changes to the business.
Please note that there are many other business and IT roles besides the Key User role within a Customer
COE. If you want to find out more about other relevant Customer COE roles in the cloud scenario, check out
the whitepaper Customer Organizational Readiness for SAP S/4HANA® Cloud which sheds light on major
roles in a Customer COE for SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

v. External Stakeholder management

Ultimately, as organizations tend to shift from on-premise to hybrid and cloud environments, the Customer
COE needs to increasingly manage a mixed set of different deployment models. Consequently, the Customer
COE needs to organize governance between the organization and external stakeholders such as cloud
providers.

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CUSTOMER COE ORGANIZATION

Basic Concepts of IT Organizations

As many of our customers ask us during the implementation of SAP, how a potential SAP IT Organization
might look like and how it should be integrated into the existing organizational structure, we will now give you
some insights into basic concepts of IT Organizations with SAP allocation. Organizational decisions and design
are obviously influenced by several factors. Hence, the strategic future orientation as well as existing structures
of the IT Organization play an important role. Additionally, a customized organizational design and
implementation requires the involvement of many stakeholder groups and a dedicated project. In discussion
with our customers, we come across three basic structures related to the organizational decision (patterns),
which need to be considered and discussed:

Pattern 1: Shared Service / Technology based structure

Pattern 2: Lifecycle (plan, build, run) based structure
Pattern 3: Business domain-oriented structure

Figure 3: Basic Concepts of IT Organizations with SAP allocation

SAP has conceptualized three basic models (Figure 3) that demonstrate how the Customer COE can be
integrated into the customer’s existing organizational IT mode. For simplification purposes, we elaborate the
three models by referring to the Plan Build Run Model to allocate all various SAP capabilities required to
develop, maintain and operate the SAP landscape holistically. This means that basically, the IT Organization
needs to cover strategic capabilities (Plan), development and project management (Build) as well as
maintenance and support (Run).

Pattern 1: Shared Service / Technology based structure

The implementation of an IT Shared Service Center (SSC) allows companies to centralize standard SAP-
related services which are common across a range of functional areas. Organizing the Customer COE as
Shared Service Center helps reaching economies of scale through centralized IT services such as the
management of a common SAP infrastructure. Centralizing SAP capabilities in a SSC often requires all
non-SAP capabilities to be organized in the same logic. This then results in the establishment of other
SSCs (e.g. infrastructure, integration etc.) next to the Customer COE Shared Service Center. Although
most of the Customer COE capabilities are centralized in the Customer COE Shared Service Center, some
Customer COE required capabilities may be covered by neighbor SSCs (e.g. interface management in the
integration SSC).

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 Pattern 2: Lifecycle (plan build, run) based structure
In a lifecycle-based structure, the Customer COE functions are split up across the cycles Plan, Build and
Run. The planning unit in a Plan-Build-Run model consists of IT strategy planning, IT governance and
architecture as well as business services portfolio management and financial management. The Change
Unit comprises program and project management and requirements management. Run provides the
operational support to keep the technology environment operating, including components such as an end-
user service desk, a field service organization and level-one and -two support operations.

Pattern 3: Business domain-oriented structure

In the third option, a business domain-oriented structure, the IT department mirrors the diverse business
domains such as the Accounting unit or Purchasing unit. Like in the lifecycle-based structure, the Customer
COE functions are split across several domains instead of being implemented as a centralized unit.
Especially SAP application management is spread across several teams and heads. Teams below the
application layer though, are usually centralized under one head supporting the various application teams.

Independent of the organizational setup of a Customer COE, we recommend customers to establish agile
teams (“Feature teams” in Figure 1) to help improve the agility of their organization. What is the purpose of
such agile teams? The main purpose of establishing feature teams is faster time to market through incremental
results. Feature teams are small and temporary teams, equipped with cross knowledge from business and IT.
Each team has a product owner and the team works on a defined product or subject that needs to be improved
or launched very fast due to a high prioritized business rational.

How can the responsibilities be distributed between business and IT?

In this exemplary setup (Figure 4), the business side is primarily responsible for the IT resource allocation and
for the benefits of any IT investment. It is also involved in the business process definition and in defining IT
requirements to support and improve business processes.
The information manager is the single point of contact for all IT demands within a certain division. This role
acts as a demand filter and demand consolidation within the division. Consequently, the information manager
is the demand process owner from the business side and the main contact partner for IT.
The counterpart of the information manager is the relationship manager in the IT Organization, acting as a
single point of contact for any IT demands of the multiple divisions. This relationship management layer is also
responsible for the synergy check across the divisions as well as the strategic fit check of IT demands. Likewise
to the information manager, the relationship manager is the process owner of the demand process from the IT
site and the main contact partner for all the different group companies. Not to forget, the relationship manger
has end-to-end responsibility for SLA-conform product operation and project delivery. The IT Supply has the
IT know-how to evaluate the incoming demands, to execute IT development projects and ongoing operations.

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Figure 4: Exemplary Customer COE Organization (on-premise) with clear distinction between IT Supply and IT Demand
Management

SAP as Distributed or Centralized Approach

The decision whether to centralize or not to centralize the SAP IT Organization is critical to its success. SAP’s
consulting experts clearly state that the best running SAP IT organizations use a centralized approach for their
SAP resources and capabilities, often referred to as Customer COE or SAP team. What are advantages of a
centralized approach? Establishing an SAP IT Organization as a centralized approach allows for a better
resource allocation and utilization than the distributed approach. Besides, while the distributed approach often
leads to heterogeneous processes and procedures per solution team which develop an independent existence
over time, centralized SAP IT Organizations often result in homogeneous processes through central, top-down
governance. Additionally, in terms of SAP Governance, it is easier to introduce or change rules, organizational
changes and innovations in a centralized SAP IT Organization than in a distributed set-up that has higher
hurdles to adjust existing or to introduce new governance rules across all solution teams.
In a nutshell, while centralized SAP IT Organizations often excel in SAP IT Processing and SAP Governance,
distributed setups require strong governance and design authority for the SAP landscape to avoid the risk of
having disconnected IT Solution teams (silos).

Future Customer COE Organization – How Customer COEs can adapt to the cloud

With the shift towards hybrid and cloud-based infrastructures, the way Customer COEs are shaped will
undergo a fundamental change, strongly affecting the role of a company’s SAP IT Organization. While
companies traditionally owned the IT systems they used and developed the architecture and solutions
according to their own priorities and business needs, cloud computing allows organizations to use IT as a
service and to shift part of the operational IT tasks to the cloud provider. Consequently, the TCO savings
realized by lower operational costs provide the opportunity to extend the innovation capabilities of the
Customer COE. Organizational changes, such as creating new innovation-related, organizational IT roles, will
be essential for the Customer COE in order to become a business-enabling IT partner for the business.
Besides, the Customer COE needs to ensure that the IT employees are properly trained, have the required
innovation-related skills or eventually need to be re-staffed in case the current IT employees are unable to
successfully bridge the focus change from operations to innovation. In general, by focusing more on strategic

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innovation rather than the tactical operations, the Customer COE can better concentrate on the strategy and
objectives of functional business units.

As today’s fast-moving world requires organizations to be agile

and to react rapidly to shifting market conditions, traditional
approaches to software delivery are often too slow due to
teams operating in silos and a lack of trust between those
teams. Hence, we strongly recommend the Customer COE to
proactively promote a “DevOps” approach along its
organization’s digital transformation journey in order to improve
both agility and business outcomes.
DevOps is a culture and mindset in an organization that gets Development and Operations closer
together by a high degree of collaboration and trust across roles and by fostering agile processes and
continuous delivery which is realized by automation in testing, deployment, and operations. Please
check out the whitepaper Introduction to DevOps and the Interaction with Innovation Adoption and
Hybrid Operations.

The term BizDevOps takes the close integration between business (Biz) and IT with the areas of
development (Dev) and operations (Ops) a step further. While for a long time the term DevOps stood
on its own and for many companies focused more on the technical view, the expansion of the term to
include the "business" (Biz) not only integrates the technical side more strongly, but also puts business-
IT integration in the foreground. The aim is to break down organizational "silos" and develop a
Continuous Delivery Pipeline (CDP) to implement innovations and market-leading new solution models
in the company at high speed and thus realize efficiency potentials.
BizDevOps requires a rethinking of the organizational interaction of companies and the overarching
cooperation of different areas in both IT and business. It is part of the "Agile Product Delivery" competence of
a Lean Enterprise. It builds the important bridge between business and IT in which organizational SAP
Customer COE roles on both sides fill clear roles, competencies, and responsibilities. It links people who
holistically support solutions within the framework of plan, develop, test, deploy, release, and maintain. The
"mindset" of the company is changing and is one of the important requirements to live BizDevOps.
In the context of SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework), "DevOps" takes an important part. Through DevOps - and
the integration of the business, i.e., the business side = BizDevOps - agile procedures are optimally supported.
Faster exchange and accelerated completion of tasks bring benefits for the company and make a major
contribution to the value chain. In the implementation of the respective implementation and migration projects
of SAP solutions, the SAP Activate methodology - as a framework and supporting element of the agile
procedures - also provides a valuable guide and value contribution.
In a nutshell, deployment models such as SaaS strongly impact the status quo of traditional Customer COE
Organizations – a change that should not be overlooked by Customer COE Managers. Since new cloud-based
solutions are increasingly becoming a top priority for organizations on their digital transformation journey, it is
of vital importance that the Customer COE recognizes the changes and adapts to them, for instance by training
its IT staff for new/improved roles focused on business innovation. Customer COE Managers should also bear
in mind that although significantly less IT staff is needed in the cloud scenario, organizations still require
organizational IT roles per IT function as the accountability of each IT function or task to be delivered still
resides at the customer side.

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