[service-orientated-architecture] Bradley on smelling data

[Gervas Douglas]

<<SOA: Time to wake up and smell the data By Ronan Bradley on December 4, 2008 5:31 PM 0 0 Vote 0 Votes The line is taken from a report by Madan Sheina entitled "Realising the promise of SOA and BPM" (Madan is also speaking on a related ebizq webinar ). I am quoting it because it strongly arguing a point that I have made consistently over many years when consulting or writing about SOA and BPM: You must recognise the centrality of data integration in these initiatives. To quote Madan: "SOA and BPM projects cannot effectively deliver on their promise if they don't resolve issues related to the various data formats, semantics, hierarchies, inconsistencies, staleness and inaccuracies within the underlying data sources." This weakness in many SOA/BPM projects tends to lead to SOA/BPM being restricted to specific problem types where all the participants have similar and preferably simple data models. In many industries, including financial services, this has meant SOA and BPM is more often found only in secondary business areas (HR, operations etc) where the data is simple and static or in areas with well defined processes (for instance in the case of BPM, message fixing or client on-ramping). The problem is that many SOA evangelists focus exclusively on the functionality side of the service and ignore what I sometimes refer to as the implicit data model embedded in any service definition. To quote Madan again: "Most business processes supported by SOA are inherently data-driven. Yet many organisations don't intuitively think about their SOA or BPM problems as data problems." This mismatch is potentially fatal to success with SOA/BPM and Madan's paper is most timely (not only because she agrees with my own views of course!) and well worth a read. To address it effectively requires significant thought and effort combining appropriate software, data governance and leveraging standards (such as those the EDM council is working on). Ronan>> You can read Ronan Bradley's article at: http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/soaroads/2008/12/soa_time_to_wake_up_and_smell.php Gervas