Information management, which includes both data and content management, is an essential building block for Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). By taking a service oriented approach to information, you can achieve much greater value from your information assets.
March 2007BUSINESS INSIGHTS Contacts: Information and SOA Dennis Szubert Gaining greater insights through Master Data Management Quocirca Ltd Tel +44 845 397 3660 Executive Summary Dennis.szubert@quocirca.com Information management, which includes both data and content management, is an essential building block for Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). By Clive Longbottom Quocirca Ltd taking a service oriented approach to information, you can achieve much Tel +44 118 948 3360 greater value from your information assets. Implementing Master Data Clive.longbottom@quocirca.com Management services provides a multiplier effect by delivering high value business services on top of an information integration services. Main Findings . Data is a critical component of an organisation's IT infrastructure However, multiple different applications and databases contain common information, making it difficult to maintain an accurate and complete understanding of master data entities such as customers, products, and accounts. . Information as a Service is required to drive process efficiencies Organisations need to look at the creation of a capability of providing a single view of data to any application or other calling service is required . Master Data Management (MDM) provides a key to opening up information as a service MDM enables an organisation to take the common data held across and organisation and its value chains and make this a "single source of truth", providing greater data fidelity, greater responsiveness and greater capabilities for corporate governance and audit . Data integration and database federation still have their parts to play The idea behind MDM is not the creation of a single, corporate database holding every piece of data but rather to create a common set of business services to manage master data both in a master data repository, and in application databases if required. Data updates to the MDM central data store can be synchronised to all the other applications that have a copy of that master information. . Service Oriented Architecture principles make MDM a key component going forwards An SOA needs data that is available as a callable service, and MDM provides the best way to create a single callable information service that presents the common data that multiple SOA services and functions will require. Conclusion The need for data to be easily available, responsive to SOA calling services and functions, and for common data to be correct is driving the need for such data to be held centrally. MDM provides the enabling capability to present common data as informational services, and must be a core part of any SOA project. An independent report by Quocirca Ltd. www.quocirca.com Commissioned by IBM www.quocirca.com
1 Information as a Service A large corporation may typically have many different financial systems, several ERP and CRM systems (or at least different instances of one ERP and CRM system), and a multiplicity of other applications ranging from human resources applications to business intelligence. In practice, these applications are not isolated in a business process sense, but need to intercommunicate and exchange information with one another. As a result, the information architectures of many large organisations can be extremely complicated. In order to resolve this complexity the concept of a service oriented architecture (SOA) has been developed. While the ideas that underpin this approach are not new, the technologies and standards for SOA that have been developed over the last few years hold out a real possibility of delivering on the promise of greater simplicity. At the same time, the successful implementation of an SOA should provide a much more flexible environment that will support the agility that modern organisations need. However, although SOA may remove the complexity from application integration, it does nothing to alleviate the equally complex structures that relate applications to the data sources that they access. SOA principles need to be extended into the data layer through the provision of what is usually referred to as information services. These can be thought of as ju... [download for more]
