Hi John, (01)
I agree with Matthew. There is one large integration project I know of where
they originally claimed they had just under 400 applications - a few did the
same thing, some were completely specialised, most overlapped to greater or
lesser degrees. On closer inspection, there were actually more like 2000
software items under their control - the vast majority of these were
interfaces between the applications (usually home-made or developed by one
of the usual suspect system houses). The cost of maintaining the interfaces
turned out to be higher than the maintenance cost of the legacy apps - one
tweak to an application could have a significant knock-on effect on several
interfaces. The system architecture diagrams for that project looked like
bowl of spaghetti. (02)
That particular project looks likely to go down an SOA approach. Common
services will be specified where possible, and service wrappers developed
for each of the legacy apps. This means only 400 wrappers need be developed
to replace the current stock of 1500 or so point-to-point interfaces. To do
this requires top-down governance of services and data standards. It begs
the question why no-one ever puts this governance in place early on, but as
Matthew is fond of saying; there's never enough time to do it properly, but
there's always enough time to do it twice. (03)
The situation outlined above is not unusual. I've encountered application
portfolios on that scale at least a dozen times in pharmaceutical companies,
govt depts., engineering companies and telcos. (04)
Cheers
--
Ian (05)
-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Matthew West
Sent: 05 January 2010 08:39
To: '[ontolog-forum] '
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Theoretical issues and practical applications (06)
Dear John, (07)
I'm sorry, but whilst this might be what happens in this specific situation,
it is not the general case in my experience.
>
> That transfer preserves only one important aspect: the value of
> the deposited funds. All the rules of A are ignored, and the
> new rules of B are applied without any need for "aligning"
> the axioms and definitions. (08)
What I have seen over the last 40 years is that computer applications are
developed to meet specific needs, eventually enough are built so that there
is a cluster of applications that overlap in scope in a way that makes
interoperation important. Doing this with interfaces is expensive, and there
are problems with inconsistencies between the systems. Eventually someone
sees an opportunity to build a bigger application that covers a larger area,
and the process starts again. The result of this process after several
rounds is large applications like SAP. (09)
The key difference to your example is that you are looking at applications
that do the same sort of thing, whereas the sort of integration I am talking
about is between systems that do different things. (010)
Regards (011)
Matthew West
Information Junction
Tel: +44 560 302 3685
Mobile: +44 750 3385279
matthew.west@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.informationjunction.co.uk/
http://www.matthew-west.org.uk/ (012)
This email originates from Information Junction Ltd. Registered in England
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