Observations and Issues
A Case for Integrating Web-based Technologies with Legacy Systems

THEN

Before you leap to the conclusion that Internet commerce consists primarily of getting consumers to buy goods from the comfort of their web browser, reconsider. The vast majority of commercial Internet-based transactions are between businesses. In the early 1980's, one of our consultants worked for a multibillion dollar company that developed a spiderous web of leased connections with 132 of its suppliers. On each end of the resulting wide area network, completely dissimilar systems were redesigned to exchange data which each system encoded in its own proprietary format. A series of programs at each end of the transmission channel converted the data to and from the local proprietary format into a common transmission format. The resulting improvements in data turn around earned the company in excess of an additional million dollars profit each month.

NOW

Today, such systems are commonplace. The leased line network, with its burden of expense, has been replaced by the inexpensive, comparatively fast, Internet. The whole concept of Business-to-Business (B2B) is the automation of data interchange between disparate companies and their dissimilar systems. It is ironical that most eCommerce vendors have placed emphasis on systems that support business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions rather than on the backend systems that drive company success!

Consider one other attribute of Internet-based systems. Many companies are still intricably tied to using paper forms, and regardless of the size of the investment represented by the mountains of unused paper forms your company still has on hand, typing or re-typing data that already exists on a digital medium is an unconscionable waste of resources. Every month, we find businesses that have such poor backend/frontend integration, that the same data is reentered several times as it passes from one department to another. For example, some companies periodically receive printed data from their eCommerce portal that must be reentered manually into the backend systems before shipping/inventory update/reorder/receipt posting/.../customer recording processes can be effected.

Because legacy systems vary so widely across industries, an automated process for integrating the frontend and backend is, at this moment, infeasible. In addition, since most of your business partners are potentially B2B partners, eventually their legacy systems will become a concern to you as well. As a result, such integration is outsourced to companies such as Western Consulting Associates who specialize in system integration.