Joe McKendrick (once again!) has another post which caught my blogreader today. This time he is pondering the relationship between SOA and data governance:
If data governance is inadequate—information is outdated, out of sync, duplicated, or plain inaccurate—SOA-enabled services and applications will be delivering garbarge. That?s a formula for SOA disaster.
He goes on to reference an article by Ed Tittel, which draws the same conclusion:
Amidst all the hype and buzzwords that surround SOA nowadays, it's still far too common for organizations that seek to integrate service-oriented architecture into their IT infrastructure to omit issues related to data integration, management and governance in their designs. As they roll out and learn to live with an SOA, however, they often discover that interoperability with other systems and solutions poses interesting problems. In fact, these problems can make interaction between systems and SOA components both vexing and time consuming.
Absolutely! When we put together our SOA Strategy Planning Tool, we explicitly acknowledged the importance of a common information model that provides:
standard representations of core information types for communication between services
Where I deviate from Joe and Ed, however, is their perspective that data governance and SOA governance are separate disciplines. Without inter-service communication there's no SOA and so SOA governnance must encompass data governance. Furthermore, that governance needs to extend beyond service design throughout the service lifecyle.
In a subsequent post, Joe calls out this post from David Linthicum in which he noodles on the same topic. I am not so sure about David's view that SOA initiatives:
need to start with the data first
It all depends on the scenario where a service-oriented approach is being applied. However, I agree with him that there is a need to understand:
the core purpose of the data, how it relates to other data, how the data is bound into entities, as well as security issues, integrity issues, and the binding to existing functions or transactions. I would go further and say that it's not just about understanding those things. In the case of security and integrity issues, there is a need to ensure that what is understood is enforced. That means defining service contracts that take account of those requirements and enforcing them through policies.
Which brings me neatly back to the SOA versus data governance discussion. Policies are the lingua franca of SOA governance and policies apply as much to the data flowing in a service network as they do to the services themselves.
If you are embarking on an SOA initiative you need to ensure that those responsible for SOA governance, ideally though an SOA centre of excellence, include individuals with data management expertise. Your governance processes should enforce utlilisation of a common information model and encompass a policy-based approach to ensure that data management objectives and constraints are enforced.
26th September 2008: 'Haitham El-Ghareeb' said:
The time I spent reading about SOA (that was 4 years ago, I belive before it turns to be the most important topic in the world the way it is now), I learnt that:
Services are what really matters and nothing else (even data). I get the point you talk about here (quality of data affects quality of service) but does that enforce us to a Data Governance Policy? How can I ensure Data Governance over outside organization data?
Data is the most important asset of any organization, and I dare if there is any organization that give you access to their data? But, they agree to give you access to their exposed services.
Data Governance is an important aspect; I cannot deny so. But, it can simply included under SOA Governance.
Reply to Haitham El-Ghareeb?
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