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.