The separate evolution of the business side of the information system and its IT side leads to inconsistent enterprise architectures. The consequences are unpredictable and costly evolutions of software systems, delayed answers to strategic decisions requirements. Numerous contributions emerged to answer the Business-IT alignment problem but they do not completely fit to legacy systems because either they are top-down or they focus on the strategic alignment or they require seamless models like the BPM-SOA alignment. We propose a method to tackle the challenge of legacy architectures alignment from a practical point of view. This method includes: (i) meta-models (business process, functional and application), (ii) a top-down and bottom-up process to feed the models and (iii) an implemented tool chain based on model transformations and weaving. Our objective is to establish and maintain a consistency link between the legacy software architecture models and the enterprise business models. This link makes them aligned and the mismatches can be revealed (as-is) and avoided in the future state of the system (to-be). We experiment the method on a real case study.
['Jonathan Pepin', 'Pascal André', 'Christian Attiogbé', 'Erwan Breton']
A Method for Business-IT Alignment of Legacy Systems