website paiken:research

Data Reengineering: Executive Summary

by Peter Aiken & Bill Girling

Many organizations today have un-integrated and brittle legacy data systems. This makes it difficult to adapt them to meet changing business needs. Organizations must analyze and integrate their data before efficiently sharing it across the organization and with external partners. Data reverse engineering (DRE) is a relatively new formulation of systems reengineering technologies that addresses situations where organizational understanding and/or the physical condition of its data systems has deteriorated or become confused. This has occurred when organizations develop stand alone, or 'stovepiped' systems. Because these systems weren't developed to easily exchange data, they don't. This case study illustrates how data reverse engineering can be applied as part of a general systems reengineering methodology.