Jill Dyche’s Talk at Gartner MDM 2013
I attended the Gartner 2013 MDM Summit, and had a chance to hear Jill Dyche, VP of Best Practices at SAS. Read more 
Opportunity for Boston-Based Consultant with Significant ESB Experience
Hub Designs is looking for an exceptional enterprise integration architect Read more
Using Open Source Software for Data Management, by Julie Hunt
another insightful article by Hub Designs Magazine’s editor, Julie Hunt Read more
The Adaptive Enterprise: New Directions for MDM?
A new article by our editor, Julie Hunt, a software industry strategist and analyst. Read more
Getting What You Need from Your Enterprise Architect
This article captures a session at the recent conference of the Data Governance SIG of the Americas SAP User Group (ASUG) by George Bryce, Corporate Data Architect at Procter & Gamble. Read more
Lean Is Not a Destination, It’s a Journey
A great new article by our editor, Julie Hunt, a software industry strategist and analyst. Read more
Business Priorities Point the Way for MDM, by Julie Hunt
A new article by our new editor, Julie Hunt, a software industry strategist and analyst. Read more
Olmstead Associates and Hub Designs Partner to Provide Information Management Services to the Financial Industry
A press release announcing the partnership between Olmstead Associates and Hub Designs to serve the financial services industry Read more
Looking for Oracle TCA Business Analyst / Developer
Hub Designs is looking for an exceptional Oracle TCA Business Analyst / Developer Read more
Liaison Briefs the Hub Designs MDM Think Tank
Jonathan Razza, who is a Director of Data Management Solutions at Liaison Technologies, sat down with the Hub Designs Think Tank in mid-October for an analyst briefing on Liaison’s Cloud MDM Services. Read more
Connecting Data Governance to Business Outcomes That Matter
Here’s another great and timely article by Julie Hunt, a software industry strategist and analyst. Read more
The System of Record in MDM, by Dalton Cervo
Today’s guest article is by Dalton Cervo, the co-author of a great new book titled Master Data Management in Practice – Achieving True Customer MDM. Read more
Information, Intelligence and Process by Julie Hunt
Here’s a great article by Julie Hunt, an accomplished software industry analyst. When we first ran it, we broke it up into four installments. We’re running it again as one continuous article (which is how Julie intended it to be read). Read more
The System of Record in MDM, by Dalton Cervo
Today’s guest article is by Dalton Cervo, the co-author of a great new book titled Master Data Management in Practice – Achieving True Customer MDM. Read more
Information, Intelligence and Process (Part 4) by Julie Hunt
Here’s the final article in this great series by Julie Hunt, an accomplished software industry analyst. Read more
Information, Intelligence and Process (Part 3) by Julie Hunt
Here’s the next article in the series by Julie Hunt, an accomplished software industry analyst. Read more
Information, Intelligence and Process (Part 2) by Julie Hunt
Here’s the next article in the series by Julie Hunt, an accomplished software industry analyst. Read more
Information, Intelligence and Process (Part 1) by Julie Hunt
We’ve been on site at a new client in South Africa since the Gartner MDM Summit. Here’s a great series of new articles by Julie Hunt, an accomplished software industry analyst. Read more
Oracle 2011 MDM Strategy and Roadmap
This session at COLLABORATE 2011 was presented by Manoj Tahiliani, Senior Director of MDM Product Management & Strategy at Oracle. Read more
Talend MDM Celebrates Its One Year Birthday
Jim Walker, who handles MDM Product Marketing at Talend, sat down with us recently for an analyst briefing to fill us in on how Talend is doing with its Talend Master Data Management product. Read more
“Data Governance In The Cloud” Seminar, March 24th in Atlanta
MDM and SOA, a Strong Partnership
digg this | 
del.icio.us | 
Reddit | 
Stumble It!
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.
Building Integration using SOA
digg this | 
del.icio.us | 
Reddit | 
Stumble It!
Many companies are still deploying Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), with proprietary adapters and integration servers. However, for a Master Data Management (MDM) solution, we recommend a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach for integration between the hub and source systems using web services.
A typical web server provides Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), so Web browsers can receive pages from a web site.
Application servers provide the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) interface and host the web services. The web services also provide object components, which provide the business service layer above the applications.
The development time for SOA-based MDM integration will depend on the number of business entities to be exchanged, the availability of a vendor-supplied Software Development Kit for the Web Services Definition Language (WSDL), the complexity of the applications to be integrated and the number of Web services to ultimately be deployed.
Some guidelines for developing an SOA integration for an MDM hub are:
- Use XML (eXtensible Markup Language) for all data exchange (XML is a language that provides a standard way of representing data and information).
- Use UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) for listing and locating applications. UDDI is a directory standard that is provided by some application tools as a built-in service to use during integration.
- The WSDL (Web Services Description Language) file should be obtained from the source system to which data needs to be sent or retrieved. WSDL is a “descriptor standard” that an application uses to describe its interface and interaction rules to other applications. WSDL is a document written in XML which describes a Web service. It specifies the location of the service and the operations (or methods) the service provides.
- WSDL should be leveraged with the help of proprietary tools provided for each application to generate the XML message required to meet that data structure.
Currently, some of the Master Data Management platforms (such as Siperian, Initiate Systems, Oracle and IBM) provide excellent SOA libraries of web services.
With some work by the end customer, these products can provide a standard set of data services at the application level. We believe this approach ultimately will give you more flexibility and adaptability than EAI-based integration.
Consolidation of Data Quality and Data Integration
digg this | del.icio.us | Reddit | Stumble It!
In a recent article, we covered the importance of data integration to Master Data Management (MDM).
This article elaborates on that in the context of today’s software market, and talks about how the visionary data integration vendors are scrambling to acquire and offer data quality as part of their integration suites.
Historically, data quality initiatives have been rolled out only on a project-by-project basis, while integration initiatives have been point-to-point application integration projects.
But more recently, as MDM programs have started gaining momentum, there is a need being felt in the marketplace for a single platform that can integrate data from multiple sources across the enterprise (web, data warehouse, ERP, CRM, legacy systems and systems from acquired companies) as well as run sophisticated data quality processes on these sources.
This requirement allows for a single administration console and metadata repository, as well as common transformations, user interface and a unified developer workbench, all on a single, combined integration and data quality platform.
This vision is consistent with moving towards a Service-Oriented Architecture as well, and is very conducive to providing a single environment for “data as a service” that is trusted and consistent across sources.
The customer tends to love it, since an integrated platform like this generally implies lower Total Cost of Ownership and smaller IT costs than standalone integration and data quality investments, and more rapid software development cycles.
The MDM vendor, if not providing such a platform itself, loves it since it can focus on what it does best, i.e. matching, merging and building data hierarchy.
Recognizing the above need, California-based Informatica Corporation acquired identity resolution vendor Identity Systems, while Massachusetts-based Trillium Software acquired address cleansing vendor Global Address. These are just two examples of recent data integration and data quality market convergence.
And the acquisition of Group 1 Software by Pitney Bowes provides more evidence of this shift. In the process, niche data quality players are finding it more difficult to compete in such a dynamic marketplace.
If you’re considering acquiring a data quality tool for a corporate initiative, consider the above dynamics. And we’d love to hear your thoughts via comments on this article.
