Legacy Systems: Transformation Strategies [Paperback]

William M. Ulrich (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 013044927X | ISBN-13: 978-0130449276 | Publication Date: June 10, 2002 | Edition: 1

In Legacy Systems: Transformation Strategies, leading IT and business architecture consultant William Ulrich presents a step-by-step, phased roadmap to legacy transformation that maximizes business value, while minimizing cost, disruption, and risk. Transformation strategies, organizing disciplines, techniques, and tools reduce the risks of deploying the component-based architectures you need to stay competitive while maximizing the business value of core systems that work.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

• Moving legacy systems into the Web-centered future: an intelligent, step-by-step guide
• Creates a framework to assess, upgrade, and migrate legacy applications and data structures

Leverage your legacy systems for competitive business advantage!

Your legacy systems embody core business knowledge that is difficult to enhance-but impossible to replicate. You've made enormous investments in these systems. They work. But they were never designed for today's high-speed, Web-centered business environments.

In Legacy Systems: Transformation Strategies, you'll discover exactly how to maximize the business value of legacy systems as you build the flexible, high-value, component-based architectures you need to stay competitive. Leading IT and business architecture consultant William M. Ulrich explores:

• Creating an environment that supports legacy transformation: strategies, organizing disciplines, techniques, and tools
• Moving incrementally to component architectures: minimizing the risks of deploying J2EE, .NET, and/or Web Services
• Legacy data and application mining, integration, and transformation
• 7 myths that surround legacy systems: how they can damage or enrich your business-and what to do about it
• Transition strategies for the new era: how to move forward without abandoning systems that work

The wrong decisions about legacy systems can damage your business-or even destroy it. The right decisions will liberate you to meet tomorrow's business challenges without needless disruption or expense. Make the right decisions: read Legacy Systems: Transformation Strategies.

About the Author

WILLIAM M. ULRICH is president of Tactical Strategy Group, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in information and business planning. He has 24 years' experience in IT and is author of TSRM, a widely deployed redevelopment methodology. Ulrich has advised Fortune 1000 companies, government agencies, technology companies, and consulting firms on IT strategies. Formerly a senior manager at KPMG, he has written for Computerworld, Information Week, and many other leading publications.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall; 1 edition (June 10, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 013044927X
• ISBN-13: 978-0130449276
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #914,805 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars No silver bullets when dealing with legacy systems!!, November 8, 2002

By 

"ram_reddy" (Huntington Beach, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Legacy Systems: Transformation Strategies (Paperback)

Corporations have been trying to retire legacy systems for the past couple of decades. Each new technology (be it client/server, ERP packaged apps, etc) were supposed to put the nail in the coffin for legacy systems. Yet, legacy systems continue to thrive despite attempts to retire them. One reason why they continue to exist is that in many instances, they support business processes in the most efficient and cost-effective manner possible. Bill's book views this area more as a transformation effort (evolution) rather than wholesale legacy replacement (revolution). This book is a must read for IT departments as they struggle to remain relavent in an era of outsourcing.

The strategies outlined in this book will help the IT department become a partner with functional business units in delivering solutions that address burning business problems. The focus shifts to providinig measurable value to the business as opposed to implementing unified and elegant technologies.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars old fogies & hackers, July 1, 2002

By 

Jon Cristofer Miller "joncris" (Countryside, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Legacy Systems: Transformation Strategies (Paperback)

Legacy Systems are both challenge and opportunity for firms seeking to exploit eBusiness and beyond. This book is a necessary and very readable text for all 'old fogie' mainframers and 'hacker' PC types... as well as anyone intending to take control of in-house software to exploit any emerging technology and business opportunity effectively. While not glossing over serious technical, management, and cost issues, it is ultimately quite optimistic.

COBOL is not dead, but growing, along with JAVA and some nascent competitors. CICS handles more activity than the Internet. Many eBusiness promoters have implied that one can hold core legacy systems constant... and only change the connecting data exchange software. In most cases, quite the opposite is true. Unfortunately, a lot of the valuable information about systems gathered during Y2K was discarded, instead of being used as a baseline for strategic optimization, integration, migration, package replacement, and - most definitely - data integration along the B2B and B2C models.

This book walks the reader through a variety of scenarios based on real successes and failures, with software tools playing a key role. Perhaps most importantly, it refutes the myth that the COBOL language and COBOL systems do not evolve on a cost-effective basis. It also makes the case that the battlefield is not COBOL against JAVA, but embedded business rules, access to data, and communications vs. inertia.

B2B and B2C open up internal corporate systems to communications from orders of magnitudes of new users - not all of whom are friendly, knowledgeable, and honorable. It is incumbent on IT management to take a renewed interest on the quality, discipline, and security mechanisms present in those legacy systems. Fortunately, it can be a manageable, cost-effective, and scalable process.

To provide practical help, Ulrich provides an excellent list of tool vendors and products in the Appendix, noting that it is illustrative, not definitive. In fact, for anyone considering a legacy system transformation, this Appendix is a good starting point on ideas of how to leverage the quality and productivity of the IT staff. Indeed, companies may find tools already in corporate libraries, awaiting integration into a tool-based transformation methodology. As the methology takes hold, it becomes easier to cost-justify and to incorporate new tools to continue such leveraging.

The author comments little on the reaction of the IT staff of addressing such tools and disciplines. From my own experience, I can add that technical staff initially fearful of 'loss of creativity' quickly discover that such application-independent tools multiply rather than diminish their options. The implicit standardization that tools bring to the table also fosters teamwork while reducing redundancy, paper-pushing, and busywork.

In short, I endorse the book wholeheartedly. I wish I had written it myself.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Finally Some Quality Attention to Legacy Systems!, June 14, 2002

By 

"clarity-consulting" (South Hamilton, MA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Legacy Systems: Transformation Strategies (Paperback)

IT trends come and go, but each new technology adds more legacy systems to application portfolios. Legacy systems account for a disproportionate share of IT spending, yet few authors tackle the subject, and even fewer offer actionable advice for capturing and extending the value of those systems. William Ulrich's Legacy Systems Transformation Strategies is a long overdue reference guide for IT professionals seeking to modernize the legacy war horses in their corporate portfolios. Relying on many years of experience in the trenches, Ulrich offers many approaches and options for supporting today's business requirements from data mining to application modularization and EAI (enterprise application integration). He provides concise and practical techniques for all aspects of legacy transformations including planning, data rationalization and business rule capture and reuse. If you own, manage, or support legacy systems, invest in this book! You won't regret it.