The business need for MDM manifests both implicitly and explicitly. MDM's utility tends to be obvious in efforts around conformance and auditing, accurate reporting efforts and single view of the customer initiatives. However, MDM often is also a hidden requirement for successful consolidation projects after mergers and acquisitions. The value of MDM in terms of return on investment, cost savings (reduced storage, reduced analysis, development and maintenance, etc.) revenue increase (consistent view master data, reduced time to resolution, effective decision-making, etc.) and competitive advantage (operational efficiency, improved visibility to company performance, etc.) has been well documented by multiple reputable groups and authors ( AMR Research , Forrester Research, Gartner Research, Yankee Group ), so I will not dwell into the existing benefits that the reader can easily reference. I will however discuss benefits of MDM as they relate to SOA enablement at a later section.
MDM systems can be federated, integrated or hybrid, reflecting a combination of the first two fundamental architectures. These three types of system's characteristics are as follows:
- Federated MDM cross-references key identifying information from participating systems to implement a registry-style solution. The main benefit of a federated solution is nonintrusiveness on participating systems which maintain their original context.
- Integrated MDM stores all master data information from all participating systems in a centralized MDM repository. This centralized repository houses the "gold copy" of all master data information. The main benefit of the integrated approach is that it provides the most complete, accurate and consistent single view of master data.
- Hybrid MDM stores common data elements from participating systems creating a "light gold copy" of master data, while disparate elements are referenced from their original system of record. The benefit and drawback of the hybrid solution is the partial combination of the federated and integrated benefits.
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)
From a systems design perspective, SOA is an architectural approach based on distributed computing principles. SOA has numerous other aspects in topics as diverse as business process design and IT governance. However, these aspects go beyond the scope of this article.
As an architectural paradigm, the participating components of a SOA system include service providers, service consumers, intermediary services and registries. A service provider publishes a service in the registry to be consumed by a service consumer who can identify the interface, purpose and location of the service from the registry. Intermediary services intercept and handle operations that are common across services and can be leveraged instead of recreated every time. Typical intermediary services include authentication, auditing, logging, monitoring, message routing, etc. All communications are performed through commonly agreed upon standards (UDDI, SOAP, WSDL, XML, HTTP/SSL). The design principles governing SOA are primarily object-oriented paradigms extended to address the service-oriented requirements. These service design principles include loose coupling, service contract, abstraction, composability, autonomy, reusability, statelessness and discoverability.
Services access information from a data services layer. A data services layer provides an abstraction layer between producers and consumers of data. The data services layer presents consumers with a virtual, aggregated view of data from multiple data sources in a consistent and centralized fashion. The layer's interface supports all consumers (human, application, external parties or business services) while providing agility to data source providers.
The benefits of a data service layer are many. Consumers are insulated from complexity, location and changes of source data systems through abstraction. Providers have the flexibility to change underlying data schemas without impacting consumers through abstraction. Companies can centrally manage, monitor, measure and report on the enterprise view of the data and metadata.
The three main categorizations of services in the data services layer are: enterprise data services, enterprise metadata services and enterprise data platform services.
- The enterprise data services area encompasses all services around data. For example, a request to be addressed by this area would be: Retrieve "gold copy" of customer "A" record.
- The enterprise metadata services area includes all services around metadata. This area would address items such as: Retrieve master data schema of customer "A" record.
- The enterprise data platform services area supports all services around the platform including management, monitoring, reporting, etc. An example of a request here would be: Retrieve MDM system, quality of service targets.
Services are defined within each area based on function as shown in Figure 1. Within each service and across all three areas, methods for search, access, create, update, delete, manage, monitor and reporting functionality should be evaluated for applicability and realization.
Figure 1: Data Services Layer
MDM Meets SOA
MDM and SOA evolved separately, but share many design principles.
- Contract first applies to interfaces in MDM and service definition in SOA.
- Reusability applies to data through conformance in MDM and services through SOA principles in SOA.
- Discoverability applies to data through master data repository in MDM and services through registry in SOA.
- Abstraction applies to source system complexity and MDM and underlying service complexity under SOA.
