In a recent blog by Loraine Lawson, an award-winning journalist who has worked as a writer and editor at TechRepublic, developing content for CIOs and high-level IT managers, she uses her sources to make the point that SOA needs MDM and that the solution needs to be “focusing on strategic business goals, rather than specific technological problems as the key to success.”
She goes on to quote Ravi Shankar, product marketing senior director at Siperian, stating “MDM is itself sometimes falling prey to implementations that focus too much on technology or tactical issues.” You can read Mr. Shankar’s complete article on MyCustomer.com here. He goes on to say “It is far more effective to organise MDM implementations around specific business problems such as compliance objectives, business process optimisation, customer on-boarding, financial risk management and so forth.”
In addition, Loraine’s blog mentions Gartner analyst Andrew White as “…strongly disapproved of the integration-only approach.” You can read Andrew White’s complete article here.
In summary, data is critical in support of the enterprise and the business requirement is why there is an enterprise. SOA can be a great enabler to tie together the business processes. Master Reference Data is necessary to support a holistic business oriented solution.
