Systems Engineering for Business Process Change

A very large proportion of commercial and industrial concerns in the UK find their business competitiveness dependent on huge quantities of already installed, legacy IT. Often the nature of their business is such that, to remain competitive, they have to be able to change their business processes. Sometimes the required change is radical and revolutionary, but more often the required change is incremental. For such incremental change, a major systems engineering problem arises. The cost and delay involved in changing the installed IT to meet the changed business requirements is much too high. In order to address this issue the UK Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) set up, in 1996, a managed research programme entitled Systems Engineering for Business Process Change (SEBPC). I was appointed as co-ordinator of the programme. The overall aim of this new managed research programme was to release the full potential of IT as an enabler of business process change, and to overcome the disabling effects which the build-up of legacy systems has on such change. As such, this aim addressed a stated objective of the Information Technology and Computer Science (IT&CS) part of EPSRC to encourage research at a system level.

A unique collection of papers resulting from the EPSRC research programme on Systems Engineering for Business Process Change

Klappentext

This important, state-of-the-art book brings together for the first time in one volume the two areas of Legacy Systems and Business Processes. The research discussed has arisen from the EPSRC research programme on Systems Engineering for Business Process Change, and the book contains contributions from leading experts in the field. Both the consumer and supplier of IT have problems with legacy systems and business process change, so Systems Engineering for Business Process Change will be of great interest to practitioners who are encountering, or likely to encounter, problems with legacy systems and business process change, as well as researchers preparing future research programmes, and those studying system and business evolution.

Inhalt
1 Business Processes, Legacy Systems and a Fully Flexible Future.- 2 Modelling the Co-Evolution of Business Processes and IT Systems.- 3 Complexity: Partial Support for BPR?.- 4 FLEXX: Designing Software for Change Through Evolvable Architectures.- 5 RIPPLE: Retaining Integrity in Process Products over their Long-term Evolution.- 6 Understanding Change: Using the Patterns Paradigm in the Context of Business Domain Knowledge.- 7 Combining Organisational and Technical Change in Finding Solutions to Legacy Systems.- 8 Connecting Business Modelling to Requirements Engineering.- 9 Interpretivist Modelling for Information System Definition.- 10 Enterprise Resource Planning Systems: Impacts and Future Directions.- 11 The Implications of Information Technology Infrastructure Capabilities for Business Process Change Success.- 12 IT Support for the Very High Value-Added Bid Pricing Process.- 13 Social Viewpoints on Legacy Systems.- 14 Co-Evolution and an Enabling Infrastructure: A Solution to Legacy?.- 15 Modelling Legacy Telecommunications Switching Systems for Interaction Analysis.- 16 Reverse Requirements Engineering: the AMBOLS Approach.- 17 Reconstruction of Legacy Systems for Evolutionary Change.- 18 Handling Legacy IT in Banking by Using Object Design Patterns to Separate Business and IT Issues.- 19 Legacy System Anti-Patterns and a Pattern-Oriented Migration Response.- 20 Assisting Requirements Recovery from Legacy Documents.- 21 The Systematic Construction of Information Systems.- 22 It's Not just about Old Software: A Wider View of Legacy Systems.- 23 Delivering Business Performance: Opportunites and Challenges for IT.- Author Index.