An integrated approach for planning the adoption of client/server systems

A large number of organizations are adopting the client/server technology. For an organization to benefit from the potential advantages of this technology such as reduced development time, improved employee productivity, and increased customer service satisfaction, the process of adoption and integration of client/server systems with existing legacy, mainframe-based systems should be carefully planned and implemented. In this paper, we consider two classes of applications, the first one consisting of applications that can run on either mainframes or client/server systems, but they are better suited for the latter, and the second one consisting of applications that are more appropriate to continue to be hosted by mainframes. In this paper, we present a model for the problem of developing a successful plan to integrate client/server and legacy systems under budget restrictions. A heuristic solution procedure based on a Lagrangean relaxation of the problem is developed. Extensive computational results across a variety of problem structures are reported. These results indicate that the solution procedure is quite effective for a wide range of problem instances.