There is a lot of Legacy Modernization, SOAs, Business Rules discussion in eBizq these days and it is a very important topic. Legacy modernization is the key to cutting costs in a lot of companies - not just IT costs but to cut waste in human effort, movement of paper, waste of time, etc.
Business process improvement is an excellent result of legacy modernization and has the potential of significantly increasing the profitability of corporations.
You walk in to any of the Fortune 100 company that has been around for 50 years or more and you will find a pathetic lack of any kind of documentation for most internal and customer focused business processes, unfortunately!
When we talk about Legacy Modernization, use of SOAs to tie a number of disparate systems in the cause of a overall business process, what gets talked about very little, is the lack of process documentation for most processes!
Mrs.B has been heading Deparment X for the past 25 years and the business process all resides in her head, since "she knows what needs to be done!".
You may be thinking that I am joking but that's the state of affairs in many large. older companies. Since things have been running smoothly for so long, nobody had a though as to why any of these need to be formally documented! But for all you know, they may doing things in the process that may not be required by law but they have been doing it since they did not know they need to change the process!
Process Documentation is the first step in even getting an idea of what the various large and small gears in an enterprise are within the context of their business.
That, probably, is the first Legacy Modernization effort that you can ever undertake, if process documentation is lacking!
All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them. - Galileo Galilei
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