Leveraging your Legacy

Software Magazine,  April, 2000  by Jp Morgenthal,  Doug Hopeman,  Debbi Walsh

• E-mail
• Print
• Link

To integrate legacy data with newly designed e-business solutions, corporations must create a real-time bridge for moving data into one central data storage facility available 24x7x365.

A lot of companies have designed and developed e-solutions over the past few years, and the marketplace has been inundated with e-everything. The most common applications are e-commerce solutions that meet the business needs of a supply chain, customer base, or end-consumers. But e-business is broader, and should be interpreted to indicate more than just the Internet-enabling of buying and selling. E-business includes IP/Web enabling of all of a company's business systems, and the integration of those business systems in a secure inter-enterprise environment. This integration allows a company to then extend its e-business externally to global trading communities.

Running and managing an e-business when fully integrated into a corporation's infrastructure includes linking into legacy business applications and customer relationship management (CRM) applications that run entirely on the Internet. Customer interfaces will support manufacturing and supply chains, financial management, business intelligence, and corporate business processes. Corporations that can support an e-business architecture have developed an infrastructure that supports streamlined customer and supplier business practices such as:

* Consolidation of local database systems into one global database store.

* Maintaining only one global order management system.

* Online customer order entry.

* Knowing up-to-the-minute how many orders have been placed globally with your corporation.

* Being able to manufacture products to order, throwing out the old adage "build it and they will come."

* Supplier-managed inventory.

* MRO purchases of goods for the corporation are done online with a select reduced number of suppliers that offer deep discounts because you order from them globally.

Internally, these same corporations are implementing business processes that allow them to:

* Access any internal system, including purchasing, shipping, employee information, etc., from anywhere in the world.

* Get up-to-the-minute reports for any business practice by logging on to a URL instead of receiving a fax or hard copy printed on paper.

* Handle first line of customer support online instead of over the phone, and talk to those customers who are more important to your business first.

So how does e-business change the landscape for a Fortune 500 company that is trying to fend off attacks from pure e-business companies like Amazon.com or E* Trade? It means that they are going to have to change the way they do business by integrating disparate business practices and systems into a more streamlined, globally reaching, e-business solution.

To do so, corporations must create a real-time bridge for moving data from legacy systems, ERP applications, back-office applications, flat files, and even PCs, into one central data storage facility. These new data storage facilities, in turn, are going to have to support new business algorithms.

Gone are the days when the IT administrator can send a company-wide e-mail informing everyone that the database will be down for a few hours while being serviced or upgraded.

IT departments will no longer be able know precisely the number of users accessing their data storage facilities, and they will be forced to calculate and prepare for high- and low-volume traffic. Data storage facilities will have to be integrated, scalable, centralized, and available 24x7x365. Developing a business strategy for a new e-business solution will become a continuous cycle of plan, execute, measure, and adjust.

Understanding Legacy Data

Legacy systems can be defined as software applications built in the past using the technology of a prior era. Since the past includes yesterday and even "an hour ago," legacy systems can include any system that is not currently in development or just recently released. The term legacy data, therefore, refers to the data that has been (or is being) generated by various business processes developed in legacy systems.

Unfortunately, legacy systems are often quite large and/or complex. They have also been developed in response to specific user needs instead of in support of the entire organization. Development without this enterprise viewpoint (using unqualified metadata) has resulted in redundant data and processes. What remains is a rather chaotic and typically poorly documented set of application code and data structures. Finding the key data for your e-commerce systems can be challenging, but not impossible. The first step is getting your bearings regarding which systems process what data, and how they all relate.

There are a lot of similarities between tracing the origins of your legacy applications and of your "Uncle Joe." (See table, this page.)

In both cases, records have been kept inconsistently. Sometimes careful recording of information is maintained; other times it's in the form of hastily written notes or word of mouth. Typically, a trail of documentation exists that requires time, patience, and research to follow in order to obtain facts or answers.