Aligning Modern Business Processes and Legacy Systems

Distributed business component computing--the assembling of business components into
electronic business processes, which interact via the Internet--caters to a new breed of enterprise
systems that are flexible, relatively easy to maintain and upgrade to accommodate new business
processes, and relatively simple to integrate with other enterprise systems. Companies with
unwieldy, large, and heterogeneous inherited information systems--known as legacy systems--find it
extremely difficult to align their old systems with novel business processes. Legacy systems are not
only tightly intertwined with existing business processes and procedures but also have a brittle
architecture after years of ad-hoc fixes and offer limited openness to other systems. In this book,
Willem-Jan van den Heuvel provides a methodological framework that offers pragmatic techniques for
aligning component-based business processes and legacy systems.Van den Heuvel's methodology is based
on three building blocks: reverse engineering, which allows legacy systems to be componentized;
forward engineering, which derives a set of business components from requirements of the new
business processes; and alignment of new business processes and componentized legacy systems. Van
den Heuvel provides a theoretical foundation for these, with chapters that discuss component-based
development, introduce a case study that is used throughout the book to illustrate the methodology,
and assess methods and technologies for legacy integration, component adaptation, and process
alignment. He describes the methodological framework itself and its techniques to align new business
processes with legacy systems by adopting a meet-in-the-middle strategy. Drawing on topics from a
wide range of disciplines, including component-based development, distributed computing, business
process modeling, and others, Aligning Modern Business Processes and Legacy Systems offers
theoretically grounded practical methodology that has been explored and tested in a variety of
experiments as well as some real-world projects.