A quick Tae Kwon Do update for the family. Gabi recently received her red belt by finishing her testing with a palm strike. Max recently completed his blue belt test with a spinning side-kick.
I finally got around to publishing another article for Thomas Erl's online SOA Magazine. The piece is titled "Relating Master Data Management to SOA".
Abstract: Distributed application development has proliferated business data throughout the enterprise. Customer information is frequently spread across financial information systems (FIS), enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, sales automation systems, Web applications, and interactive voice response (IVR) systems. Complex enterprise application integration (EAI) solutions have been erected to keep these data silos synchronized. The resulting web of dependencies has adversely affected enterprise agility.
Many enterprise architects assumed that by merely adopting SOA these complexities would be magically abstracted and a method for seamlessly aggregating this data for consumption would manifest itself by an actionable interface like a call center application or a customer self-service portal.
However, it turns out that for many large IT operations challenges such as variations in data quality, differing primary keys, and multiple systems of record have created a situation where real-time aggregation of data is impractical. Master Data Management (MDM) has emerged in the last few years as a potential solution for removing this barrier. This article discusses what MDM is, how it is related to SOA, and how they can be used together to deliver agility even in the most complex environments.