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MDM and SOA go together like peanut butter and chocolate

I always love reading what Loraine Lawson writes – it seems she gets to the heart of very practical, top-of-mind topics, and last week was no different – “Putting SOA to Work with MDM and BPM.”

I started writing and speaking about the affinity between SOA and MDM back in 2005, later evolving it into a “chocolate and peanut butter” analogy discussing how SOA and MDM are better together. I still passionately believe that, and in Loraine’s interview with Jason Bloomberg of ZapThink, it seems he generally agrees.

Let me continue the discussion started by Loraine and discuss why a SOA mindset is the right mental model for implementing MDM:

MDM as a Service

MDM is best implemented as an independent service that can meet the reliability, scalability, flexibility, performance, availability and accuracy needs of an enterprise more easily as an autonomous service than as an “add-on” to an existing packaged app like a CRM or ERP or even a DW environment. (That’s why Initiate renamed our core product the “Master Data Service.”)

SOA is the only architectural model that leads you there.

Data Models

MDM should enforce a standard structural and semantic model of whatever “master” data it helps manage. That means that the Master Data Service should enforce an independent data model that represents the needs of the entire ecosystem in which it lives, instead of merely meeting the needs of any specific application participating in the MDM ecosystem.

Said another way, in order for the Master Data Service to be autonomous, it should implement an equally autonomous data model/schema, isolating itself from any and all client systems that interact with it via their own services/intermediaries.

Why? Because those endpoint systems will change – sometimes quite dramatically – and you want to isolate as much of the rest of the ecosystem from those whiplash effects as you possibly can!

SOA helps define, implement and enforce those common schemas/messages. Also, there are lots of opportunities to enforce Data Governance policies in an Enterprise Service Bus – but I won’t go off-topic on that discussion, as much as I’d love to!

Messages

Services communicate by sending/receiving data enclosed in messages. But if those messages are built without the benefit of reusing common schemas, and if the services are moving data not vetted by the Master Data Service responsible for them, then the service is potentially propagating poor quality data as a worst case, and promoting bad semantics as a best case scenario.

So, if a service is accepting and promoting data of dubious quality, are they doing a good thing or a bad thing? Are they successful or unsuccessful? Are they of high quality or low quality?

If services are sending/receiving data which are critical to enterprise operations (master data), they should be using the highest quality data codified in the right format, expressed using the right semantic standards. That’s what MDM does for SOA.

Simply, if a service sends/receives poor quality data (content and structure), is that service to be trusted?

Want to dig even deeper? Check out a few other resources on the relationship between SOA and MDM:

Mastering Data Management - Transforming Data Warehouses with SOA

Beye NETWORK - MDM Architecture Options: Evaluating Traditional and SOA-Based Approaches

On-Demand Webinar – MDM & SOA Harmony