Authors: Richard Hopkins and Kevin Jenkins
Publisher: IBM Press (www.ibmpressbooks.com)
Published: April 2008
ISBN-10: 0137130120
ISBN-13: 9780137130122
Format: Soft cover, 256 pages.
Price: $29.99
Dealing With Legacy IT Systems
“Eating the IT Elephant” is an intriguing title for a book, so much so that it begs to be picked up just to find out what it’s all about. And once you do, the book becomes all the more intriguing because you discover that this particular book investigates a topic that is an ongoing frustration for nearly all IT professionals, namely, learning how to manage, evolve, and transform legacy IT systems. “Eating the IT Elephant” is subtitled “Moving from Greenfield Development to Brownfield.” In real estate terms, a Greenfield is known as a location in which no previous commercial development has ever been undertaken before.
In the context of this particular book, the term Greenfield is used to denote a software development environment that is totally free of other constraints, for example, an environment in which there are no pre-existing applications that could potentially, and adversely, interact with the software under development. But since modern business practices rely so heavily on the use of extensive and interconnected IT systems, it is rare today to find any sort of significant software development being undertaken in such a Greenfield environment. Conversely, the term, Brownfield, refers to those environments that have a history of developments, thus making any new developments more challenging simply because of any legacies or problems that have been left over as a result of those previous developments. It is typical too that complex IT systems tend to be poorly documented. Problems of this nature are then further compounded by the fact that there are usually only a few people, if any at all, left in an organization who possess the required knowledge of how all the different system components are meant to function or interact with one another. Attempting to develop and then seamlessly integrate any new system into such a landscape, is obviously fraught with danger.
According to Richard Hopkins and Kevin Jenkins, the two authors of "Eating the IT Elephant", their book presents a new and different approach that allows software professionals to “conduct major IT projects that takes environmental complexity into account.” They have called their approach Brownfield to “contrast it with the traditional Greenfield development approaches that tend to ignore this complexity.” Importantly, they make the point that Brownfield is not “a technology or a product, but a new way of executing big IT projects. It is a new way to eat elephants.”
Traditional advice for eating an elephant, or, in other words, tackling any large project, has always been to eat it one piece at a time, that is, to pick a task and complete it before selecting the next outstanding task! Both Hopkins and Jenkins are well credentialed to write such a book as this. Hopkins is an executive IT architect for IBM’s services business, and over the course of the last eleven years has been responsible for delivering a wide variety of systems, in fact, it is estimated that “tens of thousands of users and millions of customers use his systems every day.” Kevin Jenkins is also employed by IBM’s services business as an executive IT architect, and for the last seventeen years he too has been heavily involved in delivering a large variety of IT systems, ranging from air traffic control systems through to e-commerce systems. The accumulated experience of both of these authors means that they are fully conversant with the problems and challenges that, without fail, arise from both large and smaller scale developments and their associated methods.
"Eating the IT Elephant" is an easy book to read, thanks to the book’s authors minimal use of technical diagrams and jargon, and unless you are a programmer, you probably won’t be disappointed to discover that no lines of code are included either. The writing style adopted by the authors is pleasantly “quirky” as denoted by some of the more “tongue-in-cheek” chapter titles, with two examples being that of chapter 3 – “Big-Mouthed Superhero Required” and chapter 10 – “Elephant Eater At Work”! In addition, a selection of cartoons has been included in the book to help reinforce the messages that the book’s authors are wanting to convey. The content of the book is comprised of ten chapters, divided into two major parts, each of which contain five chapters.
The reason that the book has been divided up this way is because each part has been written for a specific audience. The first part of the book initially focuses on the current problems and failures normally associated with large scale IT projects, and then changes tack by presenting the alternative Brownfield solution. On this basis, the first part of the book has been written with a generalized IT audience in mind. The second part of the book is suitable for those IT professionals who are now ready to implement the Brownfield approach within their own company or organization. To be successful though, a major change in thinking must be maintained. And that is, as stressed by Hopkins and Jenkins, of “enabling business and IT change via a new project approach, not technology.” They reassure those readers “who take the key messages on board” that “a wealth of technical information has already been published that will enable any organization to adopt the core technologies that we have used (or equivalent ones) to implement Brownfield in their own way.”
To find out more about the book, I recommend that you take a look at sample pages from the book that are available online on the site of its publisher IBM Press (www.ibmpressbooks.com). Those sample pages include the full Table of Contents from the book along with both the book's foreword and preface, as well as the complete sixth chapter titled “Abstraction Works Only in a Perfect World.” Hopkins and Jenkins explain that the purpose of this particular chapter is two-fold. Firstly, it “examines the necessary technical context, requirements, and characteristics of the Elephant Eater”; secondly, it follows up with an analysis of the “existing IT elephant eating approaches and highlights the problems these approaches present with their extensive use of decomposition and abstraction.”
Another source of information definitely worth accessing is the book’s companion web site located at www.elephanteaters.org By visiting there, you can find out more about the Brownfield approach to software development as well as what’s required to become an “Elephant Eater.” The site also hosts an “Elephant Eaters” blog whose contributors are either architects or engineers of complex IT systems.
In conclusion, the ultimate goal of Richard Hopkins and Kevin Jenkins, the two authors of "Eating the IT Elephant", was to produce a book about “changing the way we approach large and complex business and IT reengineering projects.” I believe that they have succeeded in meeting that goal. By reading their book, you will gain fresh insights and ideas into the management, evolution, and transformation of legacy IT systems. I agree too with Hopkins’s and Jenkins’s claim that the software development methods and processes currently used in large projects “were essentially designed for projects that are Greenfield in nature, and they have remained fundamentally unchanged over the last 30 years.” It’s time for a new way of doing things, especially since “very few opportunities exist for elephantine Greenfield developments.” And that’s exactly what you get with this particular book. Grady Booch, a highly-recognized IT industry authority and an IBM Fellow, sums it up perfectly when he states, in the foreword to the book that the book’s title is a derivation of the old saying – “the way you eat the elephant is one bite at a time.” But now there is a significant difference. He believes that the book’s two authors have been successful in reaching out and bringing all of “us to the table with knife and fork and other tools”, and showing “us a way to devour this elephant in the room.”