MDM and SOA, a Strong Partnership

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Editor’s Note: Today’s post was written by Joan Lawson, a great enterprise architect whom I’ve known since 2003.

For more information on Joan, please see her LinkedIn profile — Dan Power

Let’s not allow Master Data Management (MDM) to become just another silo of data!  MDM and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) together, create a strong partnership in your enterprise architecture. 

1. Data Quality = Add Quality to SOA

SOA enables business functionality as a service.  However, it does not guarantee quality of the data on which it’s operating.  That’s a serious gap, which is filled by including MDM in a service-oriented architecture.  True business value is realized as services start leveraging the high quality data in the MDM hub and the services which surround it. 

2. Data Management Services Offered by the MDM Hub

MDM abstracts the governance of data by consolidating it into a central data model; conducting all data cleansing, augmentation, cleansing, and standardization; and creating a ‘gold standard’ source. These data management functions are centralized in the data hub and are hidden from the consumers of the cleansed data. Maximize the value of these services by consuming them from other applications that need to perform data quality processing external to the data hub.

3. Data Offered by the MDM Hub

Data services allow the consuming application to access and manipulate hub data from a service layer as a supported data source. Layering data services on the MDM hub hides the implementation of federated queries that gather the data requested by the consumer.

4. SOA, MDM, and middleware

SOA, integration middleware (Enterprise Service Bus or ESB), and MDM together can manage the detection of data changes in the source applications and propagate them from the source applications to the MDM – or from the MDM back to the consumers. With the addition of Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) and a business rules engine, a data change detected in a source can be captured, cause the data quality business rules to be executed on the data, and place the data back on the ESB to be consumed.

Are there other use cases for how MDM and SOA, together, add strength to the enterprise architecture? Please add your thoughts by commenting here or on the MDM Community.