WebServices dot org

It Takes Two, Baby

What’s a good way to describe the relationship between enterprise information management (EIM) and SOA? Perhaps that of flirtation, impending courtship, possibly marriage, and of course, occasional arguments.

Last week, I had the opportunity to join IBM's "Information on Demand" event in New York, and found the air thick with SOA. With it's usual flair, IBM laid out a bevy of software and services intended to help enterprises manage their data flows, with the goal of providing end-user decision makers with a “single version of the truth” – one set of data, from one metadata repository, that has been certifiably scrubbed and checked and refreshed up to the minute.

EIM is all about getting at the right information at the right time. By being able to sift and sort through data, enterprise executives can identify and predict new product demand, inventory flows, and spot potential fraud even before it happens. Likewise, SOA is all about getting at the right information at the right time. No EIM strategy, in fact, will deliver value without the capability to integrate with disparate silos across the enterprise, or across the globe. Conversely, there will be no value behind SOA without an effective data model that can deliver the right information. The two need each other.

Some in the industry say, however, that we been worrying too much about SOA lately, and ignoring EIM. At the IBM meeting, Gartner’s David Cearley went so far as to say that the industry has been “fixated on SOA, and that is only half of the equation.” What is needed along with SOA is an enterprise information management strategy, which provides “a holistic way of looking at information.” Adopting such a strategy would “increase the chances of success for SOA by at least 70 percent,” he opined. He noted, however, that companies are still planning their enterprise information management attributes, and that metadata management and XML are still in the early stages of evolution.

I’ve come across some folks that say a well-designed data model, based on current database and data management technology, can already accomplish all the things SOA promises. One industry veteran even poo-pooed SOA, stating that “the theory and methods for doing data – and of course metadata – definition, validation, event handling and business rules all in the same language are already well defined.” SOA only adds another layer of complexity, not too mention an additionally layer of registries, he said.
But too many enterprises have too many silos, and need ways to cost-effectively publish data from any application, running on any system, regardless of original data format. Data warehouse and EIM providers are beginning to offer Web services through which end-users can direct queries and access analytical applications. Such components can provide a service interface that centralizes the computation and sifting of data, versus traditional SQL commands. A Web service may access the right data sources and do the analysis to provide a customer’s profitability history, or calculate the probability of losing the customer, or even seek out abnormalities to detect fraud. Web services run against data can also be components of CRM or supply chain applications.

SOA will bring EIM alive across the enterprise, and EIM will be the killer application for SOA. It’s going to take two to make this thing happen, baby.