Critical Success Factors for The Migration of Legacy Information Systems to SOA

Abstract

Legacy Information Systems abbreviated as LIS are information systems that have been developed and deployed in the past and have been running critical business processes within an enterprise information system. Legacy Information Systems are considered the backbone of the organizations business since these systems are robust and carry valuable information which is of significant business value to the company. However, due to the increasing demand of business and organizational agility these systems need to be modernized retaining their existing assets. The concept of a Service Oriented Architecture provides organizations the ability to reuse their existing assets and contributes to a higher level of organizational agility. Therefore, the possibility to modernize these systems with their existing assets toward a Service Oriented Architecture becomes very interesting for organizations coping with LIS’s. However, migrating toward a SOA can be a very risky and complex undertaking. Few migration projects up until now have been completed successfully. Therefore, it is very interesting to perform research in this area. This research focuses on the critical success factors that contribute to successful LIS to SOA migration. The main adopted research method in this study has been qualitative research and evaluation based on a multi case studies at 4 large organizations. Through extensive literature examination, a framework of critical success factors for the migration of legacy systems onto a SOA has been developed. The framework has been evaluated using the case studies as input. In this research, we concluded the success factors found in our case studies through cross case analysis and factor analysis. In total 42 critical success factors were identified, of which 19 were most critical based on evaluation of these factors at 4 large globally known organizations where migration projects were carried out.