An enterprise web based solution should follow Customer and not Business needs
written by gunther gerlach-2009
Many midsize corporations have enterprise solutions based on legacy systems created more than a decade ago with no strategy or architecture in mind. From a time where sustainable and ecosystems didn’t even exist. Today, those systems became a monster hard to deal with and, extremely high to maintain. Corporations need to make a decision now and chose the appropriate technology to update or rebuild their solutions with customers on mind.
I spent the day with a Corporation where legacy systems based on an unplanned architecture became an endless list of stoppers to grow but also to gain momentum when facing new opportunities in this dynamic market. Their huge amount of undocumented code, lack of QA and continues integration process, redundant tools developed by different departments, high cost Data-center and many others, made almost impossible to think on redesign and fix.
A quick solution for this kind of companies will be move straight to Web services architecture, distributing objects, identifying and isolating functions and services as basic as is possible, to create a flexible, easy to maintain, n-tiers and scalable platform that will become easy and easier to integrate with. Soon, building a new application won’t be a process to build a whole solution, but instead will be just integrating and consuming web services in a different way, reducing development costs, speeding up process, increasing customer experience and keeping control of this fully scalable architecture.
