In practice, IT change processes often involve connecting ITSM tools – Jira and Service Now are the most common – with SAP Solution Manager (SolMan). The business organises its change management via ITSM, creates tickets etc. there. However, SAP Change Request Management (ChaRM) is simply not established enough in this area and so, in reality, both processes usually run in parallel: because change processes from ITSM have to be distributed across the SAP landscape, a lot of manual work takes place here, in particular the synchronisation of processes between ITSM and SolMan and the creation of changes in the background.
The processes should therefore be harmonised. Integration of both worlds ensures automated synchronisation of status values, any fields and automatic forwarding of changes in the SAP landscape.
At SIRIUS, we work in two ways: firstly, with interfaces developed in-house for specific, customised customer situations. This involves a classic project with requirements analysis. In such projects, the interface is always highly customised to the customer’s individual ChaRM process. The know-how about processes and developments comes from SIRIUS, for the connection to Jira (or Service Now) we need the appropriate authorisations on the customer side, or we have to work together with the customer’s respective service provider who manages their ITSM instance.
„The question of whether to develop in-house or externally is not so much a purely technical one. It must always be measured in terms of how the interface topic is to be handled in terms of processes. This requires consulting expertise such as that offered by SIRIUS.“
– Philipp Schäfer, IT Consultant
As an Atlassian partner, we naturally have in-depth Jira expertise; only the access rights for the ITSM side need to be agreed with the other party. SAP Cloud Process Integration (CPI), which contains developments already managed by the customer, is usually interposed between the two, who uses it to organise and monitor their integration.
Tailoring interface technology to the process
On the other hand, we often use interfaces available on the market, such as Conigma Connnect from the Galileo Group or Cross Connector from Cross ALM. These are characterised by a high level of configurability and scalability; they run as a server application in the company (or in the cloud). This means less development work for SIRIUS. However, the highly technical interfaces must be configured in order to model them to the customer’s processes – which we are naturally very familiar with from our project work.
When one alternative is chosen and when the other is chosen is also a commercial question. In-house developments from SIRIUS are one-off projects with a support contingent that can be called up at a later date. With third-party products, there is an initial configuration phase, followed by regular licence costs. As a rule of thumb: Customers who want to connect more than two ITSM tools are generally better off with a purchased product that they can use as a hub for a wide variety of tools, i.e. beyond Jira/Service Now/SolMan.
Whether in-house or third-party development: the tool must fit!
Example: Incident management and the change process for the business run in Service Now, the technical transport takes place in SolMan, while the tasks for development are managed in Jira. This is how the standard interfaces on the market are designed: as platforms that require their own server. With SIRIUS’ own 1:1 variant, on the other hand, one part of the interface runs directly on SolMan, while on the other (ITSM) side a counterpart is needed to receive the connection. Incidentally, we have of course been working intensively on corresponding interfaces to the SolMan successor Cloud ALM for a long time.
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