The Relevance of Knowledge About Existing Information Systems (Assessing the readiness for reverse engineering)
Sven Fischer, Anne Vos · RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · 1993
One of the critical issues in managing Information Technology (IT) nowadays is the management of existing information systems. Due to several causes, the decision as to whether knowledge about existing systems can and should be extracted has become a crucial one. This article discusses this problem area, and based on a problem definition outlines an approach to assessing the feasibility of knowledge extraction. The approach has two components: an overall, managerial part focusing on the readiness of the software organization for the new technology, and a specific, technical part focusing on assessing feasibility of knowledge extraction for individual systems. Both these components were defined and tested as part of a reverse engineering project at a large banking and insurance company in the Netherlands. 1. Introduction One of the most widely used models for assessing an IT department of an organization is Stage Model of Richard Nolan (Gibson and Nolan, 1974, Nolan, 1973, 1979, 1987)...