Urgent: Time to Better Integrate SOA and Data Management

SOA in Action Blog

« SOA Helps Tally Up the Miles | Main | Is Anyone Making Money from SOA?' And Five More Questions »

July 19, 2007

Urgent: Time to Better Integrate SOA and Data Management

ebizQ columnist David Kelly observes how we've -- both on a personal level and organizationally -- have become overwhelmed and inundated with data from all sources, on all kinds of devices and platforms.

Can SOA help us through this morass? Unfortunately, as David points out, "problems with data
consistency become significantly worse as organizations move toward implanting SOA."

The time is ripe, he believes, for organizations "to re-evaluate their information management strategies. Over time, it will become simply impossible for most organizations to continue managing data as inconsistently and stovepiped as they have."

As David astutely points out, there's a huge disconnect between SOA and enterprise information management. These are often, in fact, under the domains of separate teams, with separate agendas. And both require fairly robust investment of time and resources -- including enterprise participation and governance -- to get it right. Should such efforts be integrated?

Enterprise information management needs SOA. SOA needs enterprise information management. Simple as that. Enterprise information management is all about getting at the right information at the right time. By being able to sift and sort through data,decision makers can identify and predict new product demand, inventory flows, and spot potential fraud even before it happens. Likewise, SOA is all about getting at the right information at the right time.

Too many enterprises have too many silos, and need ways to cost-effectively publish data from any application, running on any system, regardless of original data format.

Posted by joemckendrick in SOA | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.ebizq.net/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2143

Comments

I wholeheartedly agree with the point that many in the SOA world have been ignoring data management. Perhaps it was the state of SOA for the last few years. Now people are really using it, and access to data is key.

It's no small challenge to get the SOA architects and data architects to work together. As was pointed out, they are often on different teams, and have very different goals.

So I caution people about just instructing organizations to "rethink" data management. Easier said than done. Think hundreds - often thousands - of databases, managed by one group, and what is seen as cavalier app development by another.

This is where data services via query federation can play a big role, however. Simply put, the server speaks SQL to the databases and SOAP to the Web Services. Underlying database performance, scalability, and security can be preserved; and the view publishing and management capabilities fit nicely into SOA governance.

Posted by: Tim Matthews at July 19, 2007 02:38 PM