A Guidance to Legacy Systems Modernization

Rapid development of information technology and communication (ICT) has increased the use of information systems in organizations since a decade ago. At the same time, many organizations are still using old information systems to support their business, known as legacy systems. Even though these systems cause technical problems, but they are still used to support service delivery to the customer. These systems are also essential to organizations as they have been operated for many years and possess high business value. The operation of legacy systems cannot be stopped quickly, as it will affect daily business tasks. However, organizations with legacy systems need to think about the ability of the systems to support their future direction. Modernization of legacy systems needs to be implemented to ensure the systems are aligned with global changes as well as improving the competitiveness of the organizations. This study, therefore, reviewed the phases and factors involved in legacy systems modernization to identify gaps and their insufficiencies. There are many studies on legacy systems, but only a few have focused on the overall process of legacy systems modernization. Most studies on legacy systems are technical in nature and refer to specific aspects and phases of modernization. This study aims to provide overall guidance to the organizations in performing legacy systems modernization

Cloud migration patterns: a multi-cloud service architecture perspective

Many organizations migrate their on-premise software systems to the cloud. However, current coarse-grained cloud migration solutions have made a transparent migration of on-premise applications to the cloud a difficult, sometimes trial-and-error based endeavor. This paper suggests a catalogue of fine-grained service-based cloud architecture migration patterns that target multi-cloud settings and are specified with architectural notations. The proposed migration patterns are based on empirical evi-dence from a number of migration projects, best practices for cloud architectures and a systematic literature review of existing research. The pattern catalogue allows an or-ganization to (1) select appropriate architecture migration patterns based on their ob-jectives, (2) compose them to define a migration plan, and (3) extend them based on the identification of new patterns in new contexts

An Empirical Investigation for Understanding

While working on modernization of large monolithic application; speed , synchronization and interaction with other components are the major concern for practical implementation of target system; as Service-Oriented Computing extends and covering many sections of monolithic legacy to web oriented development, these aspects becoming a new challenges to existing software engineering practices, the paper presents work which is undertaken for service orientation of monolithic legacy application including initial steps of service understanding, comprehension and extraction so that it can take a part in further migration activities to service oriented architecture platform. The work also shows that how several useful techniques can be applied to accomplish the result

Understanding SOA Migration Using a Conceptual Framework

Migration of legacy assets to SOA embodies a key software engineering challenge. Over a decade there has been an increasing interest in the approaches addressing SOA migration. These approaches mainly differ in `what is migrated' and `how the migration is performed'. Such differences aggravate achieving a general understanding of `what SOA migration entails'. We describe what such migration process entails and what distinct conceptual elements systematically define the process. Based on the comprising conceptual elements the framework which is considered as a basis for understanding and assessment of different approaches is proposed. Further, the role of the migration framework in positioning and assessing the existing methods, is discussed. Finally, the procedure for positioning and mapping of migration approaches on the framework is explained using two example migration processes

Investigation of System of Criteria within Selection Processes for ERP Systems

The application and introduction of ERP systems have become a central issue for management and operation of enterprises. The competition on market enforces the improvement and optimization of business processes at enterprises to increase their efficiency, effectiveness, and to manage better the resources outside of the company. The primary task of ERP systems is to achieve the before-mentioned objectives. For this reason the selection of a particular ERP system has a decisive effect on the future operation and profitability of the enterprise, i.e. the selection phase is highly relevant step within the introduction and implementation stage of an ERP system. The issues that are worth investigating are the criteria applied at the decision. The qualitative correlation between the size of enterprises, market position, etc. and the applied selection criteria for ERP systems could be analyzed as to whether which criteria are made use of at multinational enterprises or at SMEs. Our research is grounded in a literature review and case studies of everyday practice related to introduction, implementation and roll-out of ERP systems and it tries to provide answers for the above raised questions

On the Modularization of ExplorViz towards Collaborative Open Source Development

Software systems evolve over their lifetime. Changing conditions such as requirements or customer requests make it inevitable for developers to perform adjustments to the underlying code base. Especially in the context of open source software where everybody can contribute, demands can change over time and new user groups may be addressed. In particular, research software is often not structured with a maintainable and extensible architecture. In combination with obsolescent technologies, this is a challenging task for developers, especially, when students are involved. In this paper, we report on the modularization process and architecture of our open source research project ExplorViz towards a microservice architecture, which facilitates a collaborative development process for both researchers and students. We describe the modularization measures and present how we solved occurring issues and enhanced our development process. Afterwards, we illustrate our modularization approach with our modernized, extensible software system architecture and highlight the improved collaborative development process. Finally, we present a proof-of-concept implementation featuring several developed extensions in terms of architecture and extensibility

Working Paper 82 - Public Sector Management in Africa

Even though the public sector in African countries was expected to spearhead socioeconomicdevelopment to reduce poverty, it has proved largely ineffective in performingthis task. Some of the reasons for this ineffectiveness are excessive politicization, lack ofaccountability and representation, inability to promote the public interest andauthoritarian tendencies. The ineffectiveness has led to the call for a redefinition of therole of the public sector. As a contribution to the debate over the proper role of the publicsector and how it has coped with the New Public Management reforms, this paperassesses the state of public sector management in Africa by focusing specifically on thestrengths and challenges facing the state and its bureaucracy in relation to socioeconomicdevelopment and how the challenges can be addressed.Some of the issues the paper examines include:• the existing and/or evolving theoretical paradigms and their relevance to thepublic sector management;• the inability of the African state to promote development in comparison to theAsian “developmental” state;• various public sector reforms (civil service, decentralization, privatization,deregulation, co-production, public-private partnerships, judicial, tax) initiated toimprove state capacity and their outcomes;• the effectiveness of strategies implemented to promote accountability andminimize corruption; and• the issues and problems in aid management and coordination in Africa.In addition to these issues, the paper also highlights possible policy options for the futureand their relevance in addressing the challenges facing public sector management.