Restricted or Delayed Access to Information

Restricted or Delayed Access to Information

ORACLE

As data volumes increase and are locked inside proprietary systems, business users are increasingly forced to work without the information they need to make decisions. A custom-coded approach to data and business process integration is too cumbersome and time-consuming for IT departments. Business users need to access information at a speed that the old IT infrastructure can no longer support. But access to information is not only about sales forecasts, operational metrics, and worker performance. Access to information also has an impact on regulatory compliance. Government regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley require that companies verify that their systems are doing precisely what they claim they do. Executives cannot safely vouch for their systems unless the company fully documents its processes. To improve transparency and track ongoing business process changes, many organizations are taking advantage of process-driven SOA to create applications that reflect and implement application processes as they are defined by the business. Using SOA components makes it much easier to track the current processes, as well as when and how they change. Higher Operating E Organizatixpensesons already spend a large percentage of their IT budgets on the maintenance of legacy applications -- and this cost is increasing. Operational expenses have become such a significant portion of the IT budget that they edge out the organization’s ability to focus on innovation, and force IT staff to do more and more maintenance. To free up funds to address ongoing business needs, IT organizations must bring the cost of maintaining legacy applications under control. Achieving these cost reductions is possible by moving to lower-cost software and hardware platforms, leveraging packaged applications where possible, and consolidating technology and technology providers. Knowing that cost control goes hand-in-hand with process flexibility, CIOs should pay close attention to their IT infrastructure: with integrated, automated processes, it can enable IT staff to get things done faster. Shortage of Resources with Legacy Skill Sets People with skill sets in legacy technologies are getting harder and harder to find, creating increasing cost and risk for all organizations with legacy applications. Knowledge of languages such as ADSO, NATURAL, or IDEAL, and expertise with databases such as ADABAS, IDMS, and Datacom/DB, are increasingly scarce and expensive. Even people with skills in COBOL -- the once predominant language -- are becoming more difficult to find. Most programmers no longer learn COBOL in school; even if they were trained in it, they prefer to work in environments that support the latest technologies. Organizations need only check with their human resources department for the retirement dates of COBOL–trained personnel to determine when legacy applications written in COBOL will become a problem. Once they switch out their hard-coded mainframe environments with standards-based application infrastructures, companies typically realize significant cost savings, reduced dependence on hard-to-find programming skills, and newfound flexibility and agility. Conclusion Organizations that use legacy applications probably already realize that those systems are problematic. As operating costs rise, legacy skill sets become scarce, information becomes inaccessible, compliance requirements escalate, and IT becomes unresponsive to changing business requirements, IT modernization is no longer optional -- but has become the indispensable next step. IT modernization can be done as quickly or as slowly as an organization requires. Strategies and road maps can span multiple years and stay aligned with the organization’s business priorities and budget constraints. To determine the best IT modernization approach or combination of approaches for a specific organization, CIOs and enterprise architects must plan ahead and work closely with their IT modernization partners. That will be the topic of Part 2 of this article.Author: Véronique Anxolabehere, Senior Director, Oracle Modernization Marketing

Mission Statement:

Computer, the flagship publication of the IEEE Computer Society, publishes peer-reviewed technical content that covers all aspects of computer science, computer engineering, technology, and applications. Computer is a resource that practitioners, researchers, and managers can rely on to provide timely information about current research developments, trends, best practices, and changes in the profession.

Visual Effects and Beyond

Oliver Bimber

Visual effects are becoming increasingly realistic, with advancing processing power, computer graphics methods, and display technology that in some cases even go beyond a pure visual experience. This special issue presents four articles that describe the state of the art in visual effects in theatrical movies, TV broadcasts, computer games, and theme parks. An additional article reviews the state of practice in software architectures and another offers a sociotechnical solution to the problem of controlling spam to improve communication efficiency.

SUMMARY

Given today’s fixed or reduced IT budgets and an ever-shifting business and IT environment, CIOs and enterprise architects must make pivotal tradeoffs: how much of their budget to allocate to maintenance of legacy systems versus strategically important development and innovation, and how to get the most business value possible from their existing IT investments. Even in difficult economic times, companies realize that in order to become more efficient and competitive, they need to replace restrictive legacy systems with newer, open-standards-based solutions that improve their ability to react to business demand, reduce total cost of ownership, enable consolidation, and minimize reliance on legacy skill sets.

Underperforming legacy applications consume a disproportionate share of resources, with the average company spending 60 to 85 percent of its IT budget maintaining systems that are unable to meet the changing competitive needs of the business. To make funds available for ongoing business needs, IT organizations need to reduce the amount they spend on legacy applications and environments.

However, one aspect of IT that has always been a challenge is how to introduce new technology solutions and integrate them with existing systems without losing valuable data and processes. To evolve to the next-generation IT environment, organizations will want to reuse the content of existing applications and effectively leverage the latest technology solutions -- combining the best of the old with the new. IT modernization is the approach that allows this process to occur.

Modernization -- when companies supplement or replace restrictive legacy technologies with newer, open-standards-based technologies, while retaining the business content stored in their legacy systems -- allows organizations to maximize the use of their existing application assets as they move toward better technology environments. The need for IT modernization is often painfully obvious for any organization that relies heavily on legacy systems -- it is usually these systems causing the greatest pain. But how do you know when “do nothing” is no longer a viable strategy? How do you know that it’s the right time to modernize?

These four patterns are good indicators that you should plan your modernization project as soon as possible.

1. Loss of business agility
2. Restricted or delayed access to information
3. Higher operating expenses due to maintenance
4. Shortage of resources with legacy skill sets

Note: Although the phrases application and infrastructure software modernization, IT modernization, system modernization, and data center modernization do not always have the same meaning, for the sake of clarity, this article uses the term modernization to refer to application and infrastructure software modernization.

Loss of Business Agility

In their ability to adapt to business needs, legacy applications are anything but agile. The architecture of legacy applications is typically very rigid and cannot support the pace of business today -- processes that are easy to change in business are often difficult and costly to change in legacy computer applications. An increasingly outdated set of systems and infrastructure has become the source of higher costs and increased complexity and problems. IT departments are forced into employing a patchwork approach when these older systems need to be modified.

To obtain the maximum strategic business benefit, it is important to adopt an architecture that is built on open standards and deployed on open systems. A service-oriented architecture (SOA) approach is highly responsive because it focuses organizational efforts on the use of fewer, reusable applications that can be easily integrated and repurposed. This helps to quickly standardize changing business processes; integrate disparate applications; and rapidly assemble services into new, composite applications. In short, when business requirements change, the application architecture can change right along with them.

Due to SOA’s reuse and integration of applications, you can create assets from existing services rather than building them from the ground up every time a change is needed. In industries with constant change, consolidation, multiple business channels, and a need for customization, SOA can add substantial business value in savings of time, money, and resources. SOA’s flexible, adaptable IT infrastructure includes the following lifecycle components:

• Building and deployment of Web services and service-oriented applications
• Integration of a portfolio of reusable services to exchange information between applications
• Combination of services in orchestrated steps to create seamless process flows and rapid development of composite applications
• Security through service authentication, encryption, and authorization management
• Deployment of services and service-level agreements supported by a services directory
• Access through a Web portal, desktop client, or wireless mobile device