A roadmap for upgrading unupgradable legacy processes in inter-organizational middleware systems

Abstract

Complex changes in an Organization’s Information Systems require roadmapping to ensure planning and execution meet the objectives. While traditional projects have plethora of methodologies to help achieving their goals, agile projects are harder to plan, particularly when dealing with Unupgradable Legacy Processes (ULP). A ULP is a process that is too old, complex, critical, and/or costly to be upgraded using standard methodologies and tools. One approach to address such difficulty is to separate project and technological roadmaps to separate focuses on organizational and technical aspects. In B2B context, and more precisely Inter-Organizational Information Systems (IOIS), the increasing need for integration has generated a new layer of middleware components referred to as Inter-Organizational Middleware Systems (IOMS). IOMS is a set of services, processes, procedures and methods that allow information to be shared between multiple partners of the same IOIS despite the heterogeneity of their systems. In spite of IOMS being relatively a new concept, it lacks full valuation and dare-wesay appreciation from stakeholders, which has ultimately culminated in them suffering the problem of ULPs. The purpose of this paper is to address the issue by proposing a set of roadmaps to upgrade ULPs in IOMS. First, the concept of roadmaps is investigated and a separation between Enterprise Project (EP) and Technological Project (TP) roadmaps is put forward. IOMS is then presented before a set of roadmaps is proposed to address its ULP issues. An implementation validating these roadmaps is then presented before merits and limitations of the proposed artifacts are discussed.