Book Review: Information Systems Transformation
by Mike Rosen, Director, Cutter Consortium Enterprise Architecture Practice

If your enterprise is like most others, you probably have some trusted old systems that have served well but have become problematic for one reason or another. Perhaps the platform is no longer supported, or growth and add-ons have evolved into an expensive and difficult-to-maintain application mess. Information Systems Transformation: Architecture-Driven Modernization Case Studies , a book by William Ulrich and Philip H. Newcomb, offers some relief. You might recognize the first author as a Cutter Senior Consultant in the Enterprise Architecture practice. Coauthor Philip Newcomb is CEO of a company that specializes in system modernizations.

The book starts by describing the challenges related to system transformation and introduces three common approaches to transformation: Greenfield replacement, COTS deployment, and middleware encapsulation. Then the authors go on to discuss the shortcomings and issues with the typical approaches and present some grim statistics about typical success (actually failure) rates. The solution: an architecture-driven approach that incorporates modernization in an incremental, risk-based process that delivers business value. The section "IT Versus Business Value" drives home the point that these projects should be evaluated on the value of the business processes they support, and improvement to them, rather than cost savings to IT. After all, as the authors point out, IT is typically less than 5% of an enterprise's budget. There is so much more opportunity for cost reductions in the business by applying well-designed IT solutions.

Chapter 1 continues to introduce the basic concepts, architecture, and techniques of modernization, focusing on the importance of an adequate assessment of the real problem and not jumping to conclusions beforehand. This is followed by a quick overview of various transformation approaches. Chapter 2 covers tools and service options to help enable these approaches.

Chapter 3 covers the existing and evolving standards that apply to Architecture-Driven Modernization (ADM). Ulrich is co-chair of the ADM Task Force at the Object Management Group (OMG) and has been guiding the development of these standards for about five years now. The chapter describes the importance and benefits of standards with respect to modernization and provides an overview of the standards and their relationships. It goes into some depth on approved standards, including: knowledge discovery, abstract syntax tree, pattern recognition, and structured metrics metamodels. Emerging standards are also discussed, including: ADM visualization, ADM refactoring, and ADM transformation.

Chapter 4 describes modernization scenarios and their use in developing roadmaps and guiding projects. Of course, this is done with an understanding of how the scenarios relate to business and IT architectures. Twelve scenarios are described, along with the benefits, applicability, and risks of each. Transformation scenarios include: COTS deployment, architecture consolidation, SOA transformation, user interface refactoring, language/platform migration, data conversion, and others.

Chapters 1-4 make up Part I of the book and provide an introduction to modernization. Part II, chapters 5-14, provide ten different case studies from military, government, commercial, and research areas. The case studies illustrate many of the transformation scenarios defined earlier. Anyone considering a transformation project can probably find a relevant example here. One thing that I found interesting is that all of the cases include a proof-of-concept component to the project. The amount of information and detail in the cases is impressive -- often 30-40 pages long -- and each case comes with an excellent description of the problems and solutions.

Finally, chapter 15 provides a summary of the key concepts and a guide for moving forward -- launching and sustaining modernization efforts. This includes a discussion of the pitfalls, a well-articulated set of 15 "guiding principles," and where and how to get started.

Overall, the book provides a crash course on architecture-driven modernization, what to do, and, just as important, what not to do. Anyone who is contemplating a modernization project should start by reading this book.