Gap analysis of application landscapes

For many enterprises the introduction of service orientation is still a daunting task and there is often no distinct idea of how to approach respective projects. Only recently, SOA research addresses this open and essential question and systematic methodologies for SOA introduction and evolution have been conceived. IBM's SOMA and sd&m's Quasar Enterprise are prominent examples. In practice, these methodologies have to rely on a variety of enterprise-specific information and integrate a number of different architectural instruments. This contribution introduces one typical constituent of evolution towards service orientation making extensive use of enterprise-specific information. The presented approach and prototypical implementation for the gap analysis of current and ideal application landscapes can also be regarded as a building block for more general architecture development methodologies like for example proposed by the TOGAF Architecture Development Method. The gap analysis measures the distance between two states of the application landscape by applying and aggregating a set of metrics specifically aimed at the context of architecture development. It results in a list of concrete actions which can be considered for landscape migration planning and hence can be a helpful instrument for enterprise architects.