Changeover in e-business systems

Migration or changeover from a previous information system to a new system is particularly important for mission-critical e-business systems where errors in management of changeover will result in a negative customer experience or disruption to the supply chain.

In this section we look at significant issues involved in managing this transition from pre­vious systems to e-business systems and the transition from one version of an e-business system to the next. When introducing a new sell-side e-commerce system there are two basic choices. First, the company can fully test the system in a controlled environment before it goes live and thus minimize the risk of adverse publicity due to problems with the site. Second, the company can perform what is known as a ‘soft launch’. Here, after initial test­ing, the site will be tested in a live environment where customers can use it.

The alternatives for migrating from different versions of a system are reviewed in Bocij et al. (2005) and summarized in Table 12.2. Complete Activity 12.3 to review the relative merits of these approaches.

1. Database creation and data migration

A final aspect of changeover that should be mentioned, and is often underestimated, is data migration. For an e-commerce system for a bank, for example, this would involve transfer­ring or exporting data on existing customers and importing them to the new system. This is sometimes also referred to as ‘populating the database’. Alternatively, a middleware layer may be set up such that the new system accesses customers from the original legacy database. Before migration occurs it is also necessary for a member of the development team known as ‘the database administrator’ to create the e-commerce databases. This can be time­consuming since it involves:

• Creating the different tables by entering the field definitions arising from the data model­ling described in Chapter 11.
• Creating the different roles of users such as their security rights or access privileges. These need to be created for internal and external users.
• Creating stored procedures and triggers, which is effectively server-side coding to imple­ment business rules.
• Optimizing the database for performance.

Supporting search engines is another specific issue of site migration which is significant where companies migrate their content to a new domain name or they are using a different CMS or commerce server which uses different document names. There is a risk that the search engine will lose the history of previous ranking based on backlinks to the site and its pages. To manage this a mapping can be provided to redirect from the old to the new pages known as a ‘301 redirect’ on Apache servers.

2. Deployment planning

A deployment plan is needed to put in place the hardware and software infrastructure in time for user acceptance testing. This is not a trivial task since often a range of equipment will be required from a variety of manufacturers. Although the project manager is ultimately responsible for deployment planning, many companies employ systems integrators to coordinate these activities, particularly where there is a national rollout.

Source: Dave Chaffey (2010), E-Business and E-Commerce Management: Strategy, Implementation and Practice, Prentice Hall (4th Edition).