Time is running out on that strategy. Executives must alternatively incorporate business rule extraction and reuse into systems management and development paradigms. The project was cancelled and the IRS will enter the year 2000 with the bulk of their vintage 1960's Assembler and Cobol systems running their operational environment. With a history of replacement project failures and the task of catching up with a multi-year backlog that was ignored while year 2000 projects were completed, IT organizations have a major challenge ahead. Many subject matter experts have retired, legacy systems expertise is at a premium, business users want instant access through the Internet and IT executives are stuck in the middle of this dilemma.
History says no.
Programmers go back to old systems all the time when creating or installing a new system for a reality check. We are suggesting that management formalize this process in a way that makes business rules available to all levels of the requirements, design and development team. It doesn't matter if the new system is on the Internet, written in Java or inside a package. The same thinking should apply. This would ensure that any replacement or integration effort meets the core business requirements of the systems it plans to replace.