A methodology for designing federated enterprise models with conceptualized legacy wrappers

The ubiquity of the Internet offers progressive enterprises the possibility to organize themselves into virtual alliances. To do so, trading partners must not only align their business processes but at the same time integrate their enterprise information systems. Most of these enterprise systems are geriatric and show the signs of years of ad-hoc patching and fixing. This makes these systems, that are referred to as legacy systems, hard to maintain and adapt to new business requirements. Wrapper technology can be used to capitalize on the legacy assets, and allow them to integrate with new business components that are used to construct a virtual and federated enterprise. In this paper, we present a methodology for constructing federated (or networked) enterprise models by blending modern business data requirements with available legacy wrappers. A unique feature of this methodology is its balanced "symmetric" design perspective, combining both forward- and reverse engineering techniques.