|
IT Architecture Transformation Articles
The articles below include discussions of
architectural-driven modernization, business rule
capture and migration, IT architecture realignment and other
IT architecture transformation topics.
Architecture-Driven Modernization: Transforming the Enterprise
Systems modernization has been providing benefits to organizations seeking to
analyze software architectures in support of tactical systems initiatives such
as software maintenance. Modernization has also benefited project teams seeking
to migrate obsolete or aging languages and platforms to modern environments.
Modernization efforts are now reaching into more significant and far reaching
domains, extending opportunities into the upper echelons of IT and business
architectures. This white paper discusses how modernization can impact business
and IT architectures in very positive and significant ways.
Systems Modernization: The Assessment Process
Systems modernization is a collection of
tool-enabled disciplines that facilitates the understanding, improvement,
migration, reuse and/or transformation of existing software systems. This is the
first in a 3-part series of white papers that discusses the assessment phase of
a modernization initiative.
Systems Modernization: The Remediation Process
Systems modernization is a collection of
tool-enabled disciplines that facilitates the understanding, improvement,
migration, reuse and/or transformation of existing software systems. This is the
second in a 3-part series of white papers that discusses the remediation options
that may be applied to a variety of IT project initiatives.
Systems Modernization: The Transformation Process
Systems modernization is a collection of
tool-enabled disciplines that facilitates the understanding, improvement,
migration, reuse and/or transformation of existing software systems. This is the
third in a 3-part series of white papers that discusses the modernization
options that may be applied to a variety of IT project initiatives.
The Business Case for Legacy Architecture Transformation
Legacy architecture transformation describes the process of modifying the form,
design, and /or function of one or more legacy
applications and /or data structures. A legacy
architecture transformation strategy defines a commonly agreed upon philosophy
that an enterprise can use to reconcile legacy architecture limitations with
high-priority, time-critical business requirements.
Incorporating Existing Systems into Services Oriented Architecture (SOA)
Existing software assets are essential to your business. Application systems
contain a reservoir of business rules vital to operational continuity, yet
remain undocumented outside the source code. This article discusses how to tie
your existing systems into your SOA strategy using architecture-driven
modernization.
Extracting Business Rules from Existing Systems
Retooling entrenched business processes requires retooling one's information
systems. This may involve replacing systems or, in other cases, significantly
reworking those systems. In either case, knowledge of the underlying rules that
govern those systems is essential to understanding how the business works as
well as how replacement systems can better support your business.
Modernizing Applications &
Retooling Business Processes Require a Coordinated
Approach
I often find organizations trying to modernize application systems while
concurrently retooling business processes. On the surface it would seem logical
that business process redesign would precede major IT retooling initiatives, yet
my experience suggests that organizations often begin modernization projects in
the absence of a well articulated business process model.
Retooling Legacy Systems to Meet Business Process Retooling Requirements
Business analysts continue to streamline and consolidate business processes to
stay competitive and lower costs. As this occurs, entrenched application systems
can impede these efforts. To fully realize the goal of business process
retooling efforts, organizations may need to retool the legacy applications and
data structures supporting those processes.
Extracting Business Rules from Legacy Systems
You are in charge of retooling business processes for customer services. Your
analysis found that several regional service centers can use a common set of
standardized, streamlined business processes to improve customer service and
reduce business expenditures. Unfortunately, each business unit relies on
unique, back-end applications that perform similar, yet conflicting and
redundant functions. This could undermine the entire initiative.
A
Status on OMG Architecture-Driven Modernization Task Force
This paper provides an overview of existing systems modernization and
discusses what the Architecture-Driven Modernization task force is doing to
facilitate application meta-data interchange standards, as well as promote
modernization in general. Multiple meta-models are being developed to represent
application meta-data from multiple perspectives. This paper also communicates
the overall roadmap that the ADM task force is using to guide development of a
series of modernization standards.
Synchronize
Rapid Response Projects with Architecture Transformation
Users complain that IT responds too
slowly to their most critical and urgent needs. IT tends to respond with high
cost estimates, extended feasibility studies and multi-year delivery windows. In
response, users have created their own solutions ranging from spreadsheets to
quick and dirty applications. These short-term solutions, regardless of who has
implemented them, tend to be poorly synchronized with IT sponsored, long-term
architecture transformation projects - and this can hurt business performance.
This article discusses how to synchronize rapid response projects with strategic
architecture transformation efforts.
CIO
Insight Whiteboard: Pulling
the Plug on a Legacy System
Deciding what to do with legacy systems is
one of the most common decisions a CIO faces. This decision tree can help you
decide whether to keep, retire or change yours.
Click
here for a single-page view of the whiteboard.
Flashline
Whitepaper:
Integration, Transformation, and Reuse
The key to unleashing the power of information technology lies at the
intersection of three essential IT disciplines; integration, transformation, and
reuse. Integration projects connect business processes, applications, data, and
business partners. Transformation efforts analyze, upgrade, migrate,
consolidate, and retool application and data architectures to realign existing
IT environments with critical business requirements. Reuse provides the
philosophical foundation and management framework for integration and
transformation initiatives.
Are Your Older Systems Slowing You Down?:
Analysis: What's the Secret to Keeping Your Legacy Systems?
CIO Insight: Interview with William Ulrich
Successful Deployment of Legacy-Dependent IT Initiatives Requires Phased Deployment
Management can reduce the risks and increase the odds of delivering business value from an IT project through a phased
deployment approach. This article discusses the need for and approaches to successfully delivering IT projects that rely on or
otherwise impact legacy application environments.
Legacy Architecture Challenges - Getting Harder to Hide
Weaknesses in core computer system are stifling efforts to effectively deliver value to a
wide range customers and constituents. With recent events at major corporations and government agencies highlighting problems with legacy
application architectures, executives need a proactive strategy to address a wide range of challenges. This article
discusses how a three-pronged approach to legacy asset management, integration and
transformation is needed to turn the tide on recent failures and leverage these applications for the future.
The
Web, Legacy Architectures, and The Fourth Wave
Organizations attempting to access and reuse legacy systems and enterprise data through Web-based applications are undergoing
a maturation process that can be broken down into four waves. Each wave moves the enterprise closer to achieving e-business
goals. Careful planning is essential, particularly as an enterprise begins to encounter the "fourth wave".
Critical
Success Factors in a Business Process Integration Initiative
Business Process Integration (BPI) enables an enterprise to be more
efficient and effective, which in turn drives up revenues and drives down costs.
BPI relies on certain critical success factors. This article outlines how
companies can achieve these success factors.
Plan
for Transition To Web Services
Companies using web services can streamline the time it takes to deliver
new business capabilities, standardize results and lower application management
costs. This article discusses critical success factors for deploying a web
services environment.
Keep It Simple: Try
Integrated Tools
Should IT acquire an integrated set of software management, maintenance
and development tools, or should it license a series of point tools, each with
niche functionality? This article answers that question.
Defining
the Critical Role of the IT Architecture Team
Why do user requests take so long? Why can't Web-based
applications communicate with legacy systems? The answer lies in poorly
coordinated technical and information architectures. Efficient and effective
selection, deployment and integration of IT architectures requires an IT
architecture team. This article outlines why your enterprise needs an IT
architecture team and outlines strategies for building and deploying that team.
IT: Still the Shoemaker's Children
The irony of IT not using automated software tools to enhance the quality and
efficiency of their work is akin to the shoemaker's children having no shoes because the shoemaker had no time to make or obtain them. This article
outlines the value of applying a wide range of software automation technology to the challenges facing IT.
Aligning Strategic Systems with
Legacy Environments
Legacy systems are essential to the continued operation of complex
enterprises around the world. These organizations need to leverage intelligence
embedded within these systems as part of e-business initiatives. This article
outlines an approach for meeting this requirement.
Getting System Specs Right for The 'E'
Era
IT organizations must deploy e-business systems in a fraction of the
time spent deploying other types of systems in prior decades. They need to meet
these time constraints and still ensure that the functionality they implement is
what the end users want. This article discusses how a collaborative development
environment can meet these requirements.
Taking Another Shot at BPR
E-business initiatives are driving the need to streamline, integrate and automate business processes. Process integration and automation can improve
the efficiency and effectiveness of an enterprise - but only if they extend this capability across and beyond the bounds of the enterprise. This article
outlines requirements and strategies for business process integration and automation.
E-Integration
Needs Business Integration
Treating e-business integration as a technical issue ignores the root cause of
the integration challenge - the lack of integration within the business infrastructures that IT supports.
This article outlines business-driven e-business integration requirements and
strategies needed to achieve these requirements.
Multidimensional Integration a
Key to Digital Growth
Multidimensional integration goes beyond the current practice of linking
Web-based front ends to legacy systems and data structures and tackles the
challenge of integrating infrastructures, processes and systems with the new
world of the Internet. It requires taking a holistic look at the organizational
structures, processes, data, systems and external relationships that define a
business.
Legacy Systems Must Support
Key Business Initiatives
Legacy systems must enable, not hinder, critical business initiatives. With the bulk of a company's information knowledge base locked up in these
legacy systems, IT must interface, integrate, migrate and/or retire them before
they hinder ongoing business strategies. This article outlines the legacy
systems challenge and approaches for dealing with challenges.
Business Process Integration:
Time to Take a Holistic Approach
Back in the early 1990�s the business process-reengineering
craze swept through corporations like wildfire. The term became synonymous with
downsizing and was subsequently shunned by corporations as an ineffective
strategy. But the need to integrate business processes, driven by the explosive
demand for e-business solutions, is back on the corporate agenda. This article
outlines a seven point plan for performing holistic process integration.
Net Strategy Must Include
Discipline
Internet development tends to be a fast and loose process that needs to
mature. IT must incorporate information management disciplines into Internet initiatives or risk creating an unmanageable legacy of Web-based applications
for generations to come. This article discusses these requirements and a strategy for applying these disciplines to Internet
initiatives.
Don't Forget Business Rules in Web
Migrations
There is growing popularity for legacy business-rule reuse as companies
move functions to the Web. But doing that on a large scale requires addressing a
number of inherent complexities. This article discusses key elements in a
business-rule reuse strategy to support ongoing web migration projects.
The Essential
Information Integration Strategy
What is really behind the success of an e-business initiative? Is there a secret
to succeeding in a business-to-business endeavor across a wide range of
organizations? When will supply chains achieve the level of synchronization
needed to make an exponential economic difference? How can your company make its
mark in a virtual world? The driving force behind the hype surrounding many of
these issues is information integration.
Integration Strategy is not a
Luxury
IT has put up with fragmented information environments
for years, but now they are finally putting a spotlight on this critical issue.
As IT pursues integration's Holy Grail, poorly defined requirements and
e-business demands are driving companies in a multitude of directions.
Multidimensional integration requires a cohesive strategy that can be deployed
across and beyond the enterprise. This piece discusses key elements in an
essential integration strategy.
Stop Treating the Symptoms and
Treat the Disease?
Why do executives spend millions of dollars treating symptoms of
systemic information ailments instead of treating the disease? These symptoms
include a lack of data and functional integration, inadequate real-time support
for customers, sales people and other front-line users, the inability to deliver
relevant information to users when they need it and a loss of competitive
advantage to more nimble competitors. This article discusses why and how
executives must stop treating the symptoms and treat the disease.
Synchronize EAI with Tactical
& Strategic Initiatives
Enterprise application integration (EAI) has emerged as the latest
information management trend. Unfortunately, a typical EAI scenario is likely to
focus on near-term integration tactics and ignore long-term integration
strategies. As trends go, EAI is one of the better ones to emanate from software
vendors and trade rags in recent years because it is driven by real and
immediate business requirements. Gaining ultimate leverage from this particular
trend, however, requires blending near-term EAI tactics with ongoing support
requirements and long-term information integration strategies.
Knowledge Mining: Business Rule
Extraction & Reuse
Any organization with a large installed base of legacy systems
should consider using business rule extraction, and the reuse of those rules, as
a key component of future IT initiatives. This article provides IT organizations
with a practical, systematic approach to business rule capture and reuse.
Realigning IT with Business
Strategies
Business executives face some difficult decisions as they examine
the post year 2000 landscape. Business executives must reassess how they can
more effectively leverage IT resources by realigning information architectures
with corporate business strategies, otherwise, the gap between IT and business
will grow wider and corporations will suffer.
Business
Process Reengineering and the Legacy Systems Challenge
Business process reengineering (BPR) allows
management to realign organizational functions along more strategic lines.
Companies should examine processes now supporting the business and redesign
those processes to reflect more efficient ways to achieve organizational goals.
BPR is not an isolated phenomenon in today's highly automated environments. This
article integrates BPR and legacy migration strategies.
Legacy
Business Rule Capture: Last Piece of the Redevelopment Puzzle
Whether driven by redesigned business
processes, cost issues or other factors, IT has been chartered with providing
organizations a competitive edge through information technology. The objective
of the majority of these systems "redevelopment" efforts is to
replace, integrate or somehow accommodate legacy systems to more effectively
meet business goals.
IT's Role in BPR Project
By some estimates, over seventy percent of today's companies have
or are performing business process reengineering (BPR). BPR realigns business
processes along more strategic lines by examining current processes and
redesigning those processes to increase efficiency and effectiveness. As more
organizations launch BPR projects, one issue becomes painstakingly clear.
Radically altering business processes within highly automated work environments
typically requires modification to the information systems that support those
processes. This article outlines how to deal with this challenge.
|