Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
potential position (in terms of technology modernization and business model changes)
once the migration takes place.
In addition, the modernization assessment will support the analysis of such initial
and desired situations through a set of impact assessment tools. The main purpose of
these tools is to establish a collection of objective and measurable metrics and
indicators on which to estimate the feasibility of the migration. Furthermore, the
figures will be presented in measurement units and concepts easily shared, recognised
and acknowledged by stakeholders.
Summarizing, the main outcomes of this approach are:
•
a
method for characterising the technical and business dimensions
of the
current legacy application, in particular those concerns related with its
modernisation towards a selected target,
•
a set of common
metrics and indicators
that characterise relevant technical
aspects of the legacy application and the business model before and after the
migration takes place,
a set of tools that will
automatically evaluate the figures
related to the
modernization processes such as: resources and effort required, impact in the
company processes, estimated ROI and payback, operational risks,
•
•
a
modernization strategy
with the activities to carry out in case the organisation
decides to continue with the modernisation process after the figures are analysed.
A. Business and Technical Modernization Assessment
This step focuses on the characterization of the metrics and indicators (metrics
weighed and combined) of the business and technical dimension of the legacy
application and the company, such as the pricing model, the targeted market, the
product sustainability, SLAs, legal issue, metrics that describe the legacy application
source code and data schema complexity, compliance with baseline legacy
technologies, gap estimation between legacy and target baseline, etc. Authors of this
approach have not yet found a similar Business and Technical Modernization
Assessment procedure in literature, neither a classification of applications from an
architectural point of view, nor a business model and process one.
In order to perform this assessment several issues and knowledge are pre-required.
Among them: artefacts and knowledge related to source code and architecture,
development process, GUI, source environment and desired environment, source and
target infrastructure, covered and uncovered non-functional requirements.
This assessment is to be executed in several steps:
Step
1:
Fill in on-line questionnaires. Examples in Spanish can be found here
[2].
These user friendly questionnaires can be answered by a person with a technical role,
a person with a more business-oriented role or a person covering both roles. The main
requirement is to have a good knowledge of the application in terms of architectural
issues, programming language, security, SLA fulfilment, helpdesk, maintenance,
privacy and trust practices, marketing, business model, pricing model, target platform
model (private, public or hybrid cloud) and performance and reliability. The questions
are related both to the current situation and the desired situation, that is, how the
application and business model shall behave once the migration takes place.
