Extending life cycle of legacy systems

IT organizations have consistently failed to re-engineer legacy systems applications over the last two decades. The legacy applications continue to be vital to the business operations of most large corporations. The ability of the IT organization to effectively maintain and evolve these applications is strategic to the future of these businesses. Review of several order management applications developed over the last 20 years shows that software solutions are not able to respond effectively to evolving business-needs, becoming irrelevant to the business. The electronic customer contact management (ECCM) toolkit has been used to validate legacy systems´ requirements reducing the churning functionality caused by incomplete and incorrect requirements, while extending system life cycle and reducing maintenance costs. The eccm toolkit tackles this business challenge by delivering: (1) Validated software requirements in areas such as business rules, Web based user interfaces, operational processes, architecture, configuration management, and center management; (2) A predictable methodology that delivers effective business solutions vs. traditional specification based software. This approach enables software organizations to estimate and/or guarantee the business-solution´s ROI in spite of the predictability incomplete and incorrect requirements that will be provided by the business unit.