 |
|
SOA & Data need each other
Recently, I had an interesting discussion with a friend on how to apply SOA to an enterprise information landscape to extract more values from existing enterprise data by making it easier to reuse and share data across the enterprise. If we are serious about treating information as an enterprise asset, we need to define an architecture that increases the Return On Information (ROI).
According to my personal experience in implementing SOA in IBM's information landscape, I have come to believe that a hybrid architecture style is needed. This hybrid architecture style brings together principles from SOA, Enterprise Information Architecture, and Event-driven architecture. Below is the value that each of them brings to the table.
The enterprise information architecture (EIA) defines trusted sources of information, metadata, business data standards, data quality, information integration and information aggregation techniques for the enterprise. As part of the enterprise information architecture, an enterprise needs to focus on:
- Enterprise subject areas to define data domains that are important to the enterprise
- Process and technical metadata
- Enterprise information model to graphically show how subject areas are related to each other and how they support business processes
The SOA provides an effective foundation to integrate data with application and process by creating loosely coupled components. The SOA enables the delivery of information as a service by providing one-to-one communication between system components, consumer-based triggers, synchronous operations, and standard specification for information exchange.
The event-driven architecture provides a foundation for establishment of asynchronous operations between data consumers and providers. The event-base triggers such as publication/subscription is used to establish many-to-many communications between system components.
I call this hybrid architecture style Enterprise SOA-based Information Architecture.
Without integration with EIA, application of SOA can potentially create redundant and inconsistent information services. Then, in addition to dealing with redundant, overlapping, and inconsistent data sources, we need to deal with redundant, overlapping, and inconsistent data services too. To avoid this problem, we should consider using Enterprise SOA-based Information Architecture. This also means that we need to integrate SOA governance with the data governance and extend the role of data stewards in this journey.
This is for now to get you thinking about this important topic. I will write more later.
Categories
: [ EDA | EIM | ROI | Reuse | SOA | enterprise_data_architecture | enterprise_information_architect... | even_driven_architecture | governance ]
Apr 13 2008, 11:51:57 AM EDT
Permalink
|
|
Grady Booch thoughts on "The Promise, The Limits, and the Beauty of Software"
Grady Booch, an IBM Fellow , accepted my invitation to give a talk at University of Minnesota. He gave an interesting talk on The Promise, The Limits, and the Beauty of Software to a large crowd from academia and industry. It was not so difficult to get a crowd of 300+ in a few weeks notice when the speaker was Grady Booch!
His 2007 Alan Turing lecture had the same title. If you haven't seen it, I encouraged you to watch it. To find the webcast of his Alan Turing lecture, follow this link and then search for booch on the search field for All Years and All Channels.
Since he was talking to academia, he touched on a few topics that he didn't covered in great details in his Turing lecture. One interesting topic was how to teach software engineering and software architecture. He compared it with teaching subjects like literature. He pointed out when teaching literature; we study good and bad examples of literature work. Therefore, he argued why we should not do the same when teaching software engineering and software architecture. He encouraged teaching software engineering and software architecture by having students to study architecture and other artifacts for existing systems. However, he acknowledged difficulty in finding those software artifacts for existing systems. He talked about the project he is leading in collaboration with Computer History Museum to collect software architecture. If you have access to such artifacts, please consider donating them to the museum.
In answer to a question, he named abstraction as one of the important skills that universities should teach software engineering and computer science students.
Enterprise information architects can also significantly benefit from Grady's two advices: Study architecture artifacts for other information-centric systems, particularly from other domains, and improve their abstract thinking skills. Do you agree?
Jamshid Vayghan
Categories
: [ grady_booch | software_architecture | software_education | software_engineering | teaching ]
Nov 24 2007, 12:15:52 PM EST
Permalink
|
|
Enterprise Information Management and Business Integrity
A few weeks ago, I spoke at RSM Erasmus university in Rotterdam on enterprise information management and its challenges. To describe the enterprise information challenges, I used the elephant metaphor of reality. I used that metaphore to imply that large enterprises usually do not look at the enterprise information challenges holistically. Some groups within the enterprise act like those blind men and believe that the enterprise information challenges are solved when their local problems are fixed:-).
In the talk, I mentioned a number of those local problems. A few of them are:
- finding the relevant information is difficult. Making things worse, the same group is not usually responsible for structured and unstructured data.
- lack of clarity on data ownership.
- each group within the enterprise has its own set of tools and technology.
- tight coupling between applications and data sources.
- data base issues including lack of standards, data redundancy, and data myopia.
- lack of common vocabularies for the same subject area
- disconnect between technical architecture, business processes, and corporate policies
- existence of information silos, silo mentality, and silo organizations within the enterprise
- lack of data skills. I believe that our universities do not train the types of skills we need in this area. I will discuss this later separately.
My point was solving these issues in isolation will not solve the enterprise information issues. We need to consider all of them in a holistic manner. Therefore, our solution should address them in a holistic manner. We need an integrated solution that its elements address technical, organizational, cultural, governance, and process aspects of the problem in an integrated and consistent manner. By doing that, we will bring integrity into the business. In this complex and dynamic world, business integrity requires an integrated approach to defining, managing, and deploying core data entities of the enterprise, enterprise policies, and enterprise processes. I used the term "core data entities" to emphasize that we do not need to worry about every type of data in an enterprise. Examples of core data entities are customer and product also known as master data.
Categories
: [ architecture | business | enterprise | information | integrity | master_data ]
Oct 21 2007, 11:20:11 PM EDT
Permalink
|
|
Enterprise Data Architecture and Challenges
At the heart of every major enterprise transformation initiative is the ability to leverage data as an enterprise asset. Harnessing data as an enterprise asset means having the ability to derive actionable knowledge from data. Actionable knowledge can only be derived when data (i.e. data characteristics) is consistent, trusted, has high quality and complies with the enterprise policies and processes. These data characteristics can only be achieved when data is managed using an explicit (yes, explicit not implicit!) Enterprise Data Architecture (EDA) and at the enterprise level. The increasing number of merger and acquisitions at recent years demands for more work in this area.
Last summer, I spoke at an IBM internal data summit about enterprise data challenges and approaches we, in IBM, have taken to address them. Since then, I have met with many of our customers who are dealing with managing data within an enterprise or cross enterprises. I also designed a graduate level course on enterprise architecture and taught it at University of Minnesota. Many of students, who were professionals, were interested on the EDA part of materials!
I am planning to share some of my thoughts in this area and our internal best practices and lessons learned here. I will discuss challenges, potential solutions, gaps, and roadmaps to fill the gaps. I will also argue:
- There is more than one type of data in an enterprise and each one requires different type of consideration.
- We need to pay attention to the data lifecycle too.
- EDA is much more than enterprise data modeling.
- SOA and EDA need each other.
- Technology by itself cannot address the enterprise data challenges. Changes in organizational culture, governance and business processes are also needed.
- The role that enterprise mash-up applications and Web 2.0 related technologies play.
- What skills an effective enterprise data architect need to have.
As I will discuss later, the enterprise data architecture is aimed at flattering the enterprise by removing information silos. We need a Flat Enterprise for a Flat World after all! We also need a way to measure the progress toward transforming to a flat enterprise because someone will ask us “How flat is our enterprise?”.
Categories
: [ EDM | IOD | SOA | architecture | challenges | data | enterprise | information | modeling ]
Apr 01 2007, 04:00:43 AM EDT
Permalink
|
|
|
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S | | | | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | | | | | | | | | | | | Today |
|
Enterprise Information on demand: Best Practices and lessons-learned
