A structured transformation approach for legacy information systems-a cash receipts/reimbursements example

Legacy information systems are difficult to transform into new or upgraded information systems. Part of the reason being the incompatibility and the unscalability between the systems. We propose and present a structured transit approach and process to provide an alternative in order to guide and ease the large scale legacy system transformation. We describe a real world case study where we applied the structured transit method successfully in 1997-1998. This transformation project is a two-year company-wide business process reengineering on their financial and accounting information systems. Through this project, we confirm our perception that the structured problem and solution domains require structured techniques to tackle and to solve the compatibility and scalability issues because the structural discrepancy represents the core of the above problems originally. We give the details of the application in five analysis tasks: functional analysis, data analysis, system flow analysis, discrepancy analysis, and conversion analysis.