These days, the two new buzz words in IT are service oriented architecture (SOA) and master data management (MDM) and many organizations are either in the planning stages or implementation stages of one or both of the above approaches.
However, most companies are considering these to be two mutually exclusive development tracks. After all, one focuses on the architecture side of the house and the other on the information side.
The reality is the two approaches are very complementary and provide a great strategic advantage for the organization if are planned and even developed in parallel. In this article, I focus on why it is the right strategy for CIOs and other executives to consider both approaches simultaneously as part of the strategic direction of the IT department even though each might be planned and implemented separately.
But, before delving into my reasons for such fusion, let me back up a second and give my non-technical definition of each of the above approaches.
SOA refers to an architectural approach within the organization that utilizes loosely coupled, reusable, and interoperable software services to support business process requirements. These services are made to be platform independent and allow all applications within the organization to utilize them.
Simply put, we’re going to develop services once and use them in many applications regardless of the platform. An example could be of a service that will deliver all information about a customer. Having such a service allows IT departments to reduce development and testing costs and increase the time-to-market for their internal applications.
MDM focuses on identifying, gathering, defining, explaining, integrating, cleansing, and storing all information about a specific key business subject area in one (logical or physical) repository so this information could be delivered to users in a clean, consistent and timely manner. The key business subject areas across almost all organizations include customer, product and/or services, vendor, and financial information.
Currently, in most organizations, information associated with a key business subject area is stored in a variety of applications, platforms, and repositories. Moreover, information elements are defined differently across these silos. For example, a customer within one silo might be defined as the person who purchased an item within the past 3 years, where in another silo a customer could be considered a person who requested a quote, but never actually purchased anything.
MDM is the process that not only consolidates key subject data, but also provides consistent definition of this data across the organization. Simply put, MDM works the same as the water department of your local metropolitan area where they integrate water gathered from wells, aqueducts, lakes, etc., store it in a reservoir, cleanse it to an agreed quality level, and deliver it consistently and in a timely manner to every house or business in the area.
If we follow the above analogy, then MDM is the metropolitan water department, SOA is the city planning department creating rules and regulations and providing services for delivery of this water to homes and businesses.
Mutually Inclusive
There are several reasons why MDM and SOA should be performed as part of a unified strategy within the organization and not separate exclusive approaches:
Subject Area Services: The most compelling argument for this marriage is subject area services. Subject area services are services access information associated with a key subject such as customer or product. If master data is not managed and delivered from one repository, services will have to call several data sources to capture and integrate this information. This extra step will degrade performance and delivery of the information to an application.