Many of you have been living in the same house for several years. In the process you may have accumulated furniture, clothes, antiques, etc., and have forgotten why certain things were purchased in the first place or that certain things even exist in your basement.

Large enterprises have large basements. Their limited space is overflowing with existing hardware, software, and applications. Why is it that as technology has advanced and newer systems are being purchased, many companies still have the 30-year-old mainframe and its related technologies in their IT basement? I'm not suggesting that you throw out the mainframes. The more technology that comes out each year, the more everyone is buying and piling it in their basement without checking to see if they need it and whether an existing system needs to be eliminated first. And how will the newly purchased products work in conjunction with existing systems? Java technology, introduced into an enterprise without a plan, compounds the existing chaos as anything else. The Java platform includes some APIs to help enterprises alleviate the problems and manage their applications but these APIs are rarely utilized.

If you are organizing your basement, creating space and maybe thinking of buying new stuff to fill the newly created space, this time ensure that there is some way to keep inventory. Track applications, services, and components through a knowledge repository. Ensure that what you buy works well with what you already own. Last of all, manage everything you own so you can finally track and realize the much sought after ROI.

Renovation, integration, and management - these are the three stages needed to organize an enterprise's IT landscape.

Renovate
The renovation stage is the least automated of the three. When renovating, an enterprise needs to take a hard look at what they own and decide if there are similar functionalities in multiple places, whether certain tools are redundant, and whether certain applications are even being used. It involves manually sifting through the IT landscape and compiling a knowledge base. I've come across situations where applications that were not being used were still being supported in a production environment.

A catalog of applications, components, and services needs to be created with an enterprise-wide metadata repository containing attributes about these services. The repository also needs to include policies, standards, and guidelines for building or buying new stuff. A simple repository and knowledge management tool can be created using Java technology like JSP and servlets, the Java Metadata API, and the Web services-related APIs. This can be searchable and modifiable and gives a unified view of the IT landscape.

Integrate
The integration stage involves making architectural decisions and understanding relevant scenarios. The Java technology platform has strong support for messaging and Web services including service description and discovery, security, and distributed computing. There are also various pure play, multi-protocol enterprise service bus platforms based on Java that have emerged that allow integration in a heterogeneous environment. The ESB platforms are branded as business integration platforms. They support various messaging architectures and include support for JMS, JCA, and SOAP. The Java Connector Architecture is an integration mechanism that is part of the J2EE specifications to integrate to enterprise information systems.

Manage
An enterprise needs to factor in management of their components and services early on in the architecture and design phase. The Java platform provides Java Management Extensions (JMX) as a part of its core. I've seldom seen enterprise architects design their software components and services to include a management interface in addition to whatever business interfaces are needed. There is no comprehensive offering from the vendor community yet, although management platforms are starting to emerge. Many enterprises are creating reusable application frameworks and then using them to build their applications. If inclusion of a management interface to software components and services is instilled into the enterprise architects, it will ensure that the applications are now clean, organized, well integrated and well managed.

As enterprises embrace Web services and SOAs and transform themselves into service-oriented enterprises, the road ahead starts with renovating the basement and utilizing all the available features of the Java platform.