Note: the following post is a distillation and update for a feature originally published in ebizQ in 2008.
Service oriented architecture has been around for a while, but there are still some missing pieces. While many SOA projects may be executing flawlessly with modular, standardized services, it's time to start looking at the data that's flowing through these architectures. Often, it's flawed, outdated, or simply out-of-synch information.
In fact, while we've been a great job of building SOA-enabled infrastructures to support better data management operations, we haven't been effectively integrating data to meet the expectations of the SOA deployment. If a portion of the information that is coming out of the SOA-enabled infrastructure is bad or unreliable, trust in all the data eventually breaks down. In essence, many SOA-based implementations taking place across companies may be flatlining because they are serving up unreliable information - an element that has been out of the control of SOA designers.
As more of the enterprise gets service oriented, part of that effort should involve the development and deployment of data services that address these integration problems.
SOA alone will not address the vexing issues of enterprise data integration. "SOA promises to deliver business agility by breaking down barriers between silos of applications, and by reusing business services," says Ash Parikh, SOA guru at Informatica. "However, if the data stuck inside silos is bad, is stale, or is inaccurate, imagine the calamity. The silos may disappear, but then data from many different applications becomes co-mingled."
The issue isn't simply about enabling access to data across the enterprise, Ash said. The greatest challenge enterprises face is ensuring the quality of the data that becomes accessible as a result of SOA. "Enterprise data is complex, it's about volume, latency, and many formats. It requires that as part of SOA, data be treated as a strategic enterprise asset that addresses the various data integration challenges."
The way to accomplish this purposing of enterprise data assets within a SOA environment is through the delivery of "data services," Ash continued. "Data services is a highly flexible simple and cost-effective solution that provides the model and standards-based reusable abstraction layers that lower the complexity of delivering data from silos. Data services deliver a single consistent view of all enterprise data at the right time."
From a technical viewpoint, a data service is a modular and reusable well-defined business relevant-service that leverages established technology standards, he adds. A data service "enables access integration to right time data throughout the enterprise and across corporate firewalls. Data services create an abstraction layer to all analytical, operational information, and serves it up to other abstraction layers, which could be an [enterprise service bus]," he says.
As organizations increasingly look to SOA and enterprise data management best practices to better streamline processes and deliver increase capabilities throughout the enterprise, it's clear that SOA needs effective enterprise data management behind it, and EDM needs service oriented architecture approaches. The two need each other.
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