Why urbanize?

The overall objective of any urbanization approach is to increase company performance whilst maintaining the focus on reducing costs per management task.

From the IS perspective, the goal is to open the IS to multi-channel access without increasing its complexity.

Identify trajectories

By its very essence, urbanization is a moving target: it depends on changing business needs. The management of urbanization trajectories keeps it on course:

• Business:
  • Business disengagement > Impact on businesses (common repositories, impacts on the transverse processes, etc.)
  • Review of business practices (front or back office, soften the interfaces, improve productivity, etc.)
  • Separate  production from distribution
• IS :
  • IS simplification plan > Disengagement and preparation for software  integration by block (or business area), deploying common repositories
  • Evolutions towards an SOA

Establishing the governance foundations

Managing the urbanization must be on a factual and objective basis :

• Publish and make available the IS repository to Business and IS participants
• Table of metrics by software component
• Plan of potential actions for simplification and transformation
• Specification of dashboards analyzing the IS

SOFTMAINT urbanization process

As part of an urbanization project, it is essential to rely on a fixed image of the information system, updated whenever necessary. The SOFTMAINT approach is based on the implementation of the Mia-Insight software solution, which supplies a detailed inventory of the IS components. The main steps in this approach are:

• Define the urbanization rules on the target:
  • Establish the target business model
  • Establish the urbanization rules to be used
  • Deduce the application architecture rules and complete them
• Analyze the source:
  • Document the production IS through reverse-engineering
  • Classify the components, simplify them
  • Standardize them
• Identify the trajectories:
  • Align the IS with the changing business needs

The SOFTMAINT urbanization approach takes into account the possibility of relying on tools to improve the quality of traceability between urbanized urban and the reality in production.