The Butterfly Methodology: a gateway-free approach for migrating legacy information systems

The problems posed by mission-critical legacy systems-e.g., brittleness, inflexibility, isolation, non-extensibility, lack of openness-are well known, but practical solutions have been slow to emerge. Generally, organisations attempt to keep their legacy systems operational, while developing mechanisms which allow the legacy systems to interoperate with new, modern systems which provide additional functionality. The most mature approach employs gateways to provide this interoperability. However, gateways introduce considerable complexity in their attempt to maintain consistency between the legacy and target systems. This paper presents an innovative gateway-free approach to migrating legacy information systems in a mission-critical environment: the Butterfly Methodology. The fundamental premise of this methodology is to question the need for the parallel operation of the legacy and target systems during migration.