A mission-critical application is purchased from a vendor and rolled out into the enterprise, and soon a business unit decides it would be great to put a web front end on it to expose a subset of the functions to a subset of the users. Much work and coding ensues to integrate the web application with the vendor’s back-end database. The web application, of course, adds some of its own requirements to the mix, which drives the creation of another database, hosted on another platform. The web application ships with much fanfare, almost on time, grossly over budget, and is met with accolades from corporate users far and wide.

This success, and the subsequent wide adoption of the processes, fosters a need for another business unit to leverage some of the data and some of the functionality, but again, of course, with some esoteric deviation in the business rules that only an MBA can understand.  At this point, it would be nice to leverage the integration work that the original business unit did, extending the functionality and reach of this vendor application. Unfortunately, that group was working with technology flavor of the week “A,” and this new groups is using technology flavor of the week “B.”