Data Management for SOA
Jun 25th, 2008 by Eric Samson
Seen on EDS blogs: Data Management for SOA.
They wrote somewhere: ‘… Jill Dyche asserts that “SOA Starts with Data“. She advocates creating data services-creating data hubs as services that manage and provide access to master data. Starting with data services has an appeal to IT organizations that feel the need to adopt SOA …’
This sounds like music to my ears.
I also like the conclusion: “Data management for SOA should be approached as requiring an enterprise logical data model, mechanisms for federation and sharing of data among relatively autonomous service units, and a data management plan that defines responsibilities, flows, master data stores, latency of updates, synchronization strategies and accountability for data integrity and protection. This plan must align with the organizational responsibilities of service units and their data needs, and it must ultimately support an integrated representation of the state of the enterprise-history, current state and future plans.”
See also Jean-Jacques Dubray’s reaction on InfoQ: Enterprise Data Management, the 3rd face of the SOA/BPM coin?
Enterprise Data Management on Wikipedia.
The Enterprise Data Management Council Web site.
Salut, Eric!
Thanks for the mention but when the EDS blog quoted me I wasn’t sure whether they were celebrating the point or being critical of it. All I know is that our clients are hungry for data and the concept of “data as a service” is an appetizing one for them. But their IT departments insist on making SOA harder than it needs to be and we’ve actually watched several SOA efforts get “de-scoped” in the last several months. We’ve been coaching clients that data can be de-coupled from the applications and systems that use it, thereby providing a service to all of them. With some notable exceptions, at most companies it’s an idea that’s a bit ahead of its time.
Jill Dyche
Partner, Baseline Consulting
Author of e-Data, The CRM Handbook, Customer Data Integration
Thank you for your note Jill. Even if I agree we’re still just at the beginning of a new wave, we do have some customer request for a Data Services Platform. I think things are going in the right direction now. We now need solid technologies to make Data Access easier in SOA.