1. Approach to Dissertation

2. Timeframe – When? Year 1 –Taught part Sept 1996 – June 1997 –Project proposal June 1997 Year 2 –Break Year 3 –June 1998 – June 1999 –Research –Write-up

3. What? Original idea –How do you solve legacy systems? Criticism –Too broad Changes –Legacy business systems in the state sector in Ireland

4. How? What is a legacy system? What are the categories of causes? What are the categories of effects? How do causal categories relate to effect categories? Definition of legacy status Investigation into solution space Categories of solution components Problems mapping to solution components Study of suitability of SAP R/3 as a solution

5. What Is a Legacy System? Journal search ‘Inspec’ search Collected ALL references relating to legacy systems Trawled for definitions With help of Dennis Kelly, differentiated between causes and effects.

6. What Are the Categories of Causes? Extracting from –Repeated definitions in literature –Personal experience Came up with –3 dimensions –Legacy Causal Criteria Framework

7. What Are the Categories of Effects? Extracting from –Repeated definitions in literature –Abstract and generalise –4 categories Came up with –Legacy Effect Determination Framework

8. How Do Causal Categories Relate to Effect Categories? Major research into Causal criteria Worked backwards –Best practices in the area –What problems are these practices trying to solve? –What are the problems? Also cross-referenced to previous research. Legacy Assessment through Cause and Effect (LACE) Framework

9. Definition of Legacy Status How ‘legacy’ is a legacy system? Measurement of legacy status, rather than a yes/no answer to ‘Is the system legacy?’ Brought together into a definition –Advice of Dr. Bing Wu, supervisor.

10. Investigation Into Solution Space Looked up solutions –MILLIONS of them! –Tried to isolate components of solutions –Less components than solutions

11. Categories of Solution Components Deal with them – Gradually / big bang –In-house / outsource –Data/code reuse –Reengineer the code –Wrap application –Iterative enhancement / software restructure / re-host –Reengineer the business process

13. Problems Mapping to Solution Components Not as well researched Referenced to best practices in first part of document Unproven

14. Study of suitability of SAP R/3 as a solution Given a generic application, how SAP R/3 matches

15. Thorough assessment of SAP R/3 against the causal criteria framework System suitability System suitability to business processC Business process to organisational mission C System technology to organisational environment C Underlying platform suitability Hardware suitabilityE Network suitabilityC Development environment suitability(including OS) I Data management suitabilityC Software quality Quality of software written into components E Quality of static design of current system E Quality of change managementI

16. Journal search MIS Quarterly Communications of the ACM Management Science IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering Information and Management Journal of Management Information Systems Sloan Management Review Datamation Computer (IEEE)