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Most conventional approaches to IT development assume that you're building entirely new systems. Today, "Greenfield" development is a rarity. Nearly every project exists in the context of existing, complex system landscapes—often poorly documented and poorly understood. Now, two of IBM's most experienced senior architects offer a new approach that is fully optimized for the unique realities of "Brownfield" development. Richard hopkins and Kevin Jenkins explain why accumulated business and IT complexity is the root cause of a large-scale project failure and show how to overcome that complexity "one bite of the elephant at a time." You'll learn how to manage every phase of the Brownfield project, leveraging breakthrough collaboration, communication, and visualization tools—including Web 2.0, semantic software engineering, model-driven development and architechture, and even virtual worlds. This book will help you reengineer new flexibility and agility into your IT environment...integrate more effectively with partners...prepare for emerging business challenges...improve system reuse and value...reduce project failure rates...meet any business or IT challenge that requires the evolution of transformation of legacy systems. • System complexity: understand it, and harness it Go beyond the comforting illusion of your high-level architecture diagrams • How conventional development techniques actually make things worse Why traditional decomposition and abstraction don't work—and what to do instead • Reliably reengineer your IT in line with your business priorities New ways to understand, communicate, visualize, collaborate, and solve complex IT problems • Cut the elephant down to size, one step at a time Master all four phases of a Brownfield project: survey, engineer, accept, and deployMore Reviews and Recommendations Richard Hopkins is an Executive IT Architect for IBM's services business. Over the past eleven years he has delivered a wide variety of systems, including a biometric-based national identity card system, a credit card account services system, and a customer management system for a national government. Tens of thousands of users and millions of customers use his systems every day. In recent years he has grown frustrated with the ability of standard methods and tools to deal with the accumulated business and IT complexity he wrestles with every day. Rather than compromise with the standard "Greenfield" approaches, which ignore this complexity and pretend the world is one of "fluffy clouds," Richard opted instead for an engineering-based "Brownfield" approach that embraced the complexity. The patented and ground-breaking innovations he and his team made as a result are now being used worldwide on a variety of complex projects. These innovations are published for the first time in Eating the IT Elephant. Richard is a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (FIET). He also chaired the technical definition of the BioAPI standard from 1998-2000. BioAPI is the de-facto programming standard of the biometrics industry. Kevin Jenkins is an Executive IT Architect for IBM's services business. Over the past seventeen years he has delivered numerous systems as diverse as air traffic control systems to e-commerce engagements. This variety of scale of systems, both in size and duration, allowed him to get a real-life view of the advantages and disadvantages of large- and small-scale developments and methods. When he came together with Richard on an engagement todeliver a customer management system for a government agency, he had a chance to bring his experience with these different development methods to improve the success rate of this large project. In order to meet timescales, he utilized a model-driven solution to complete a large part of the delivered system, which offered a fast means to deliver the solution. This started Kevin thinking of extending this to the generation of the complete solution—and the idea of "Brownfield" was born. Over the following years he collaborated with Richard in developing the Brownfield. |
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