HANA Adoption Strategy

For most organizations,eventually it will come to a point where there will be hot debate on deciding to get HANA in or not. HANA is sometimes mistakenly took in as a new tool to improve reporting and planning performance and the investment evolves on funding the hardware, upgrade and licences. Well, it is not uncommon approach as scoping those mentioned areas already took up millions of dollars. And to take off HANA as new technology together with a strategic adoption program, it will cost triple fold of the initial set up cost.

HANA is actually a roadmap and a BI adoption program beside treating it as another 'Accelerator'. The implementation roadmap needs to be planned according to:
• Assessment of current BW environment to decide the migration strategy
• Alignment with SAP BO Upgrade and new innovations such as Lumira,Mobi & Explorer
• Alignment with Master Data initiatives
• SAP BI Governance Adoption
• Integration and adoption across other integrated systems, departments, projects
• Delivering business values and innovations in line with company long term goals and BI visions

Companies out there should avoid making mistakes to get only the hardware and tool in place without streamlining it as part of the long term BI roadmap that consist of stakeholder positioning in BI, delivering business values, adoption, governance, scalability, program sustainability in economic downturn, and global support. Having to say that, BI at the end of the day  is an expensive practice/tool/process that can only deliver back the ROI if it is strategically executed and planned.