Application Transformation: Architecting the Future of Your Business

By Eric Bruno

Transform your applications, and you just may transform your business into a more agile, competitive company.

The old adage "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!" doesn't apply to software. While it's true that software code doesn't age or wear out like physical equipment, the technologies and systems it's based on do. Additionally, finding technicians who are experienced in maintaining older software gets more difficult—and more expensive—over time. So it's in a company's best interests to keep its software systems up to date.

Integrating legacy systems with Web-based applications is a good example of how companies can update their software in a way that transforms their business, bringing them new audiences and markets. For instance, Web-based interfaces that allow consumers to book their own travel (airline tickets, hotel rooms, car rentals and so on) have yielded cost savings for the travel industry, in addition to boosting customer satisfaction.

Sites such as Travelocity combine "hotel," "flight," and "car rental" data into one Web interface. For instance, they grab flight data from Sabre (the airline reservation system) and car-rental and hotel data from other sources via Web interfaces to build transformative applications like the one shown here.

Over the past decade, the IT industry has seen unprecedented levels of spending on integration projects—up to 80 percent of overall IT budgets in some cases.

But such efforts can be risky. "We started a project to transform an existing Web-based application to a newer application server and database model; every aspect of the application was touched, from data formats, the distribution of components, the code, and even the hosting site," says the architect at a prominent online legal publication company. But the project ran into trouble early on because the company's internal project participants couldn't agree on methods and documentation standards with one of the company's partners (such problems also can plague projects done entirely in-house).

"We quickly realized things needed to change, and we implemented a transformation process that everyone followed," the architect says. "The quality of work improved immediately, and the rate of progress increased with it. Also, it became a much more enjoyable project for everyone to work on."

Businesses can take the following steps to reduce the risk and streamline the efforts involved in achieving business transformation by way of application transformation.