Maintainability and control of long-lived enterprise solutions

Maintainability of long-lived enterprise solutions is today’s top challenge. The constantly increasing functionalities of information technology provided these days, including hardware and software products, leads to giant networked application infrastructures. Business processes glue applications and data sources to enterprise solutions to fulfill business needs. Large firms are more and more dependent on the permanent availability of their enterprise solution. A failure in one part of the landscape can rapidly impair the whole enterprise landscape and harm the business. Maintainability is a critical issue and new approaches are required to keep complex landscapes under control at all times. We introduced the Real-Time Business Case Database, RT-BCDB as a basic concept. This paper presents the next reasonable step. Process Activity Control describes a steering mechanism for complex enterprise application landscapes, to gain more stability, transparency and visibility of processes activities in order to improve maintainability and to support the system administration in their daily operations.