Master Data Management and Service-Oriented Architecture

MDM is a set of disciplines, processes and technologies for ensuring the accuracy, completeness, timeliness and consistency of multiple domains of enterprise data - across applications, systems and databases and across multiple business processes, functional areas, organizations, geographies and channels.

This definition highlights the heavy emphasis on integration - at the application or database level and at the business process level - that a successful MDM initiative requires.

Generally, the first two things I ask about when discussing someone’s MDM strategy are “What’s the data quality component of your MDM strategy?” and “What does the integration component look like?”

The technology for implementing an SOA has advanced so much in the last five years that it would be shortsighted to integrate MDM with the source systems and downstream applications of your enterprise using older methods of integration.

However, just as I still run into people who aren’t planning to incorporate data quality tools into their MDM solution, I occasionally talk to companies that are planning to integrate MDM into their enterprise using technology from the late 1990s or early 2000s - or even worse, through point-to-point custom code.

SOA-based integration offers so much more than simple movement of data from “point A” to “point B.”You can create and orchestrate business processes that span multiple applications within and outside the enterprise and then secure, manage and monitor those processes. By using MDM as a foundation for SOA, you can be sure you’re providing high quality, proactively governed data to the rest of the enterprise through the services you create.

The combination of SOA and MDM is powerful. SOA is designed to add flexibility to IT infrastructures in creating new business processes or modifying existing processes. But all too often, underlying data quality issues prevent the new business processes from achieving their goal.

On the other hand, MDM is designed to aggregate and cleanse critical corporate master data. Having separate “single versions of the truth” for customers, suppliers and products (each in its own silo), however, doesn’t solve the underlying “islands of data” problem. If anything, it can perpetuate it or make it worse.

The combination of MDM and SOA can transform the way business embraces and uses technology. It can help the business move toward better alignment with IT and help to close the business execution gap.

IT can move beyond being a cost center and truly become a partner with the business in innovation through carefully planned, tightly executed projects, new processes, tighter integration and better management of systems, processes and data.

So what would that look like? To deliver value using MDM and SOA, I recommend three layers of abstraction (on top of the underlying data sources themselves):

• Data services (basic operations for create/read/update/delete),
• Business services (business process management [BPM], reusable business rules) and
• User interface (UI) services (e.g., portlets).

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