Migrating Legacy System to the Web: A Business Process Reengineering Oriented Approach

Abstract

The Internet is an extremely important new technology that is changing the way in which organizations conduct their business and interact with their partners and customers. To take advantage of the Internet open architecture, most companies are applying business reengineering with the aim of moving from hierarchical centralized structures to networked decentralized business units cooperating with one another. As a consequence, the way in which software information systems are conceived, designed, and built is changing too. Monolithic, mainframe-based systems are being replaced by distributed, Web-centric, component-based systems with an open architecture. Ideally, business process reengineering should entail the adoption of new software systems designed to satisfy the new needs of the redesigned business. However, economic and technical constraints make it impossible in most cases to discard the existing and legacy systems and develop replacement systems from scratch. Therefore, legacy system migration strategies are often preferred to replacement. This entails that a balance must be struck between the constraints imposed by the existing legacy systems and the opportunities offered by the reengineering of the business processes.