Conclusions

The architecture of software confederations should be applied in the following cases:

  • Cooperation of independent economic entities (also competing ones - see Ex. 1).

  • State/municipal administration network

  • Health care

  • Information systems of large enterprises

  • Information and control systems containing real world process control like systems of automated (family) houses

In addition to the above described systems, software confederations should be used also when the SW system:

  • Requires usage of third-party subsystems or legacy systems,

  • Is too large to be developed and maintained as a monolith,

  • Some software confederations' development techniques are needed, or

  • Purchased information systems need to be extended by new (for given application specific) functions.

The SWC paradigm is becoming quite common in practice. It is due to the current situation in software that can be characterized by the following key facts:

  1. SW systems become global and support activity of organizations composed by/from distributed organizational units with different level of autonomy (like state administration offices, health care institutions, international enterprises, and coalitions of independent and often competing subjects). The organizational units and/or independent subjects can (and often must) have their autonomous information systems. The collection of the units or alliance members can be very large and can vary.

  2. There is a growing need to integrate third-party products like statistical packages, legacy systems, workflow systems, etc., into the system.

  3. The structure of such systems changes dynamically. The systems are open — they have a changing number of users. It (along with many more reasons) means that it is necessary to build the systems as SWC's.

  4. There are very powerful communication networks and middleware software allowing a high capacity data transfer all around the world and offering a broad collection of services (message formats transducers like XSLT, flexible message formats specification tools like XML, security and routing services, etc.).

  5. Powerful user interface tools (Internet browsers) are available.

The first, second, and third points imply that it is desirable to build the system as a network consisting of almost independent information systems (IS) of individual organizational (sub-) units and of almost independent applications. Due to many reasons, the constituent software subsystems must be integrated into a confederation such that it should support many local activities as if there were no SWC (e.g., all local functions should be available for local use — see Figure 1). The constituent information systems can be (at least for some time, often forever) also used in the way they had been used before they were integrated into the confederation. It can be easily achieved if the network is a P2P one with nodes being permanently available services (compare Internet, see e.g., Král and Žemlička (1999).

The fourth point indicates that such a solution is technically feasible. The fifth point is important for the construction of the integrated transparent interface of the whole confederation.

The dynamic character of the confederation (Král and Žemlička, 2000, 2001a) enforces a flexible format of messages. This problem is solved by XML and its dialects (compare Král and Žemlička, 2000).

The paradigm of SWC changes substantially managerial problems connected with the use as well as with the development and maintenance of software systems, especially of information systems. We have now a methodology enabling the construction of systems of the complexity comparable with the size and complexity of such technical products like power plants. SWC is the way for software to be a high-tech product of the quality and stability comparable with other high-tech products like planes, cars, and boats.

The use of the SWC paradigm is not too difficult, but it requires changes in habits, skills, and knowledge of software designers. Some prejudices should be overcome.

There is some hidden opposition from software vendors as SWC can imply less dependence of software users on software producers.

It is the time for software researchers and CASE system designers to develop tools applicable during the development of software confederations.



Managing Globally with Information Technology
Managing Globally with Information Technology
ISBN: 193177742X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 224

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