The Insider's Guide to Business and IT Agility
By Joe McKendrick, Contributing Editor and Analyst, ebizQ , 12/11/2008
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Service oriented architecture has evolved into the mainstream of businesses over the past two to three years, 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 Often, it’s flawed, outdated, or simply out-of-synch information.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.
In an ebizQ Webinar a few months back, Ash Parikh, Informatica’s resident SOA expert, took up this question, and suggested that as SOA is built out, part of that effort should involve the development and deployment of data services that address these integration problems.
This challenge is also highlighted in a new report out of Datamonitor. The report's author, Vuk Trifkovic, says both enterprises and vendors alike tend to concentrate on making the applications operable and interperable -- to the tune of $37 billion a year -- but don't pay near enough attention to the data within. The insufficient attention paid to data in major enterprise deployments -- which may be unreliable, inaccurate, or out of date -- ultimately contribute to the failures of the large integration-related investments, he warns.
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,” Ash said. “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.”
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June 3, 2009
One of the most compelling trends in the enterprise business technology space over the past year has been the emergence of cloud computing. In ebizQ’s upcoming Qcamp virtual un-conference, leading industry experts and practitioners will explore the role of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) in supporting cloud-computing initiatives. Additionally, the new skills that developers and IT managers need for successful cloud development will be discussed.Register
Date: Aug 26, 2009
Time: 12:00 PM
ET- (16:00 GMT)
Date: Sep 30, 2009
Time: 12:00 PM
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Date:Aug 26, 2009
Time:12:00 PM
ET- (16:00 GMT)
Date:Sep 30, 2009
Time:12:00 PM
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