ABSTRACT
For many managers, the stories of information technology (IT) accomplishments seem like wish fulfillment. Within nine months, a retail bank overcomes the limitations of 30-year-old legacy IT systems to launch a high-tech operation that offers its customers a complete range of banking services over the telephone. The software hub—the central component of the hub-and-spoke approach—brings together the capabilities needed to get data from one application to another, no matter how different the underlying computer systems. The flip side of the coin is the ease with which hub-and-spoke technology enables companies to replace their legacy systems when they are ready to do so. Because it can deal with both old and new systems, decisions on when to upgrade old systems can be taken simply on the merits of the technology, rather than on the need to extract data from the grip of a legacy system.
