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Business Process Reengineering and Legacy Systems TransformationBusiness process reengineering (BPR) allows management to realign organizational functions along more strategic lines. Companies 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. Information Systems (IS) organizations, due to the large installed base of legacy systems, play a key role in BPR efforts. Redesigning business processes that are tightly coupled with legacy systems implies that there will be a huge impact on those systems. Conversely, understanding current business functions requires analysis of these same systems. Fortunately, a rapidly emerging discipline supports analysis and migration of legacy systems to support BPR. It is called "Systems Redevelopment". System transformation has several phases. These include enterprise and system-specific assessments, positioning of systems for ultimate transformation and the actual transformation stage itself. Some combination of these related disciplines are typically required to support changing business requirements. To examine the relationship between BPR and systems redevelopment, it is necessary to review a typical scenario. BPR is initiated where management expects to realize the greatest gain - customer service for example. Customers are frustrated when they must speak with many individuals to resolve a problem. To address this issue, service functions must be consolidated into one area. Analysis of the existing environment supports BPR by identifying customer data and examining how that data, and functions impacting that data, flow across the enterprise. BPR also has a reciprocal affect on these systems. Since customer data is being processed by many stand alone systems, the impact of BPR marks a fundamental change in how systems support customer services. Systems redevelopment has advantages over traditional analysis techniques. IT analysts, isolated within functional areas, tend to miss the "big picture" view required to support BPR analysis. Additionally, analysts may lack formal approaches for capturing and depicting cross functional views of legacy systems. Systems redevelopment, however, provides well defined analysis techniques and deliverables to support BPR. A second advantage is that these analysis techniques provide the basis for an implementation plan based on BPR project findings. Redevelopment techniques also leverage extraction / derivation tools to streamline this process. Finally, formal redevelopment techniques can be combined into various "scenarios" to support a wide array of BPR recommendations. One commonly used, four-stage framework to support this analysis is the Ulrich Systems Redevelopment Methodology (USRM). Stage one, Enterprise Redevelopment Planning, defines how common data is shared among systems. Once impacted areas are identified, individual systems are examined in more detail. In the customer service example, a dozen systems perform customer functions that impact dozens of data stores. Stage two, Inventory/Analysis, identifies redundancy and inconsistency among related data stores as input to redesign and consolidation efforts. Functional analysis is performed based on project requirements. Again, this effort is leveraged using tools and techniques. Results of this process yield a detailed plan to meet BPR requirements. Implementation recommendations resulting from a BPR project may take on tactical and strategic perspectives. For example, short-term requirements may dictate creating a summary level extract data base that is front-ended by a graphical user interface (GUI). Another approach links GUI front-ends to host based systems and data bases. Both of these approaches are interim solutions to data centralization and are supported by techniques embedded in stages three and four of the USRM framework - Positioning and Transformation. Positioning tasks, within these scenarios, support data consolidation and middleware enabling. Transformation defines various model driven redevelopment techniques to meet data redesign and migration requirements. Front-end approaches provide interim relief to customer centralization issues. However, legacy systems are fragile and must evolve over time or eventually collapse like a "house of cards". The redevelopment approach incorporates these earlier techniques as interim steps within a more comprehensive plan. Strategic requirements may include, for example, replacing stand alone systems with an integrated client/server system. This hinges on BPR project findings. A comprehensive approach, incorporating short and long-term requirements, provides data migration and functional consolidation through extensive use of Positioning and Transformation techniques discussed above. In these cases, systems redevelopment is applied to its fullest extent to address priority demands, phased migration and multi-system integration initiatives. BPR is an excellent way for organizations to retrench as they move into the next century. But implementing BPR in the absence of a comprehensive systems redevelopment strategy will limit overall benefits and expectations. Systems redevelopment, driven by a formal set of techniques, allows organizations to augment BPR analysis and implement short and long-term recommendations more rapidly and more successfully than traditional techniques.
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