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A story of empowerment: industry executives are starting to break the chains to their legacy systems that have held them back for so long. By deploying their systems around a service-oriented architecture, a new era of management freedom is being born.

Article Excerpt
It has been said the mortgage industry is unnecessarily inefficient, and I heartily agree. Despite the development of numerous technology applications designed to improve efficiency, companies are facing daunting hurdles simply to benefit from these technologies. In fact, achieving substantial progress in the mortgage industry may seem harder than conquering Mount Everest.

For the last decade, business and information technology (IT) executives have been hampered by technology itself, unable to reap the benefits of newer technological advances. The following scenario may sound familiar to you.

Several years back, I had a very enlightening discussion with the chief executive officer of one of the nation's top 10 lenders. He was complaining about the inadequacy of his mainframe loan processing system, a complaint not uncommon in this industry.

When the concept of replacing the system was brought up, he vehemently vowed, "Not on my watch." He proceeded to reach down into his desk and pull out a complex diagram that looked like the schematics to a microwave oven. There were hundreds of lines, circles and arrows all pointing in multiple directions. The diagram represented the company's disparate computer systems, and the arrows and lines illustrated the hundreds of integrations that had been custom-created over the years.

Unfortunately, the complex spaghetti bowl of lines and arrows only represented two-thirds of the company's interfaces. The IT department was still in the process of identifying all the subsystems and communications that went in and out of those systems.

The CEO explained how the replacement of his loan origination system (LOS) would require the disconnecting and rebuilding of those hundreds of interfaces so that his loan processing system could continue to speak with his underwriting system, his secondary system, and so forth. If he disconnected the LOS, he feared the company would likely experience enterprisewide failures with possibly grave financial repercussions.

The kind of fear holding this CEO back was not unlike the Y2K fears that haunted IT departments before the turn of the millennium. To him, there was no clean way of getting out of the mess his company had become entrenched in. So he decided not to undertake the risk of replacing the loan origination system on his watch, a seemingly complex and risky endeavor that he would leave for whomever inherited his position.

Three years later, this company was sold to a major mortgage company that is today still running that same old system. The new company is now trying to identify the best legacy replacement strategy.

Regretfully, this is not an unusual scenario. With every custom integration that's done to improve communications between two computer systems, companies only worsen a bigger problem. Every integration and every custom link is an extra interface that needs to...