Ronan Bradley's FinanceTech Directions

Over the last few years SOA has been getting all the limelight but there is another enterprise architecture which is likely to become more prominent: Enterprise Data Management. On sign of this growing importance is the growth of the EDM council which has announced 12 new members from both the financial institutions and vendor sides.

To quote Michael Atkin, managing director of the EDM Council in the press release:

"As data management becomes both an increasingly important regulatory and business priority,financial institutions are realizing the importance of EDM to their operational infrastructure"

EDM focuses on is itself broad in scope, with Ajay Bhargava defining it here as having six main components:

• Data architecture
• Data quality management (DQM)
• Metadata management
• Master data management (MDM)
• Data security
• Data governance

Addressing each of these across the organization requires a significant amount of effort (and the EDM council is focusing primarily on standardisation of data terms and definitions).

Why is EDM becoming more important? To a large degree for similar reasons as it's more glamorous cousin, SOA: To address the requriement for faster more efficient real-time integration and to avoid the cost and risk associated with stitching together potentially incompatible islands of data.