Throughout its highly complex lifecycle, data goes through a series of sophisticated treatments as it gets created, processed, and consumed by different applications and business processes for various operational and analytic purposes. As data is exchanged, SOA creates interdependencies between applications and business processes demanding high-quality, consistent, and timely data, suggesting that the full benefits of SOA can’t be realized if IT projects don’t incorporate a well-planned Enterprise Information Management (EIM) strategy to address the widespread and expensive problem of data inconsistency and inaccuracy.

While traditional approaches to SOA, based on a simple Web Services paradigm, address high-level application integration and business process orchestration needs, they tend to minimize, or worse yet ignore, the complexities of heterogeneous, inconsistent, dirty data that lies fragmented throughout the enterprise. Furthermore, technologies such as Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Enterprise Information Integration (EII), frequently used as the underpinnings of SOA, can’t effectively deal with varying data volume and data latency needs.

In this article, we’ll discuss the last mile issue in SOA, namely, overcoming the hidden data-centric pitfalls that prevent SOA from delivering on its promise to ensure business agility. We will also showcase how IT organizations can enhance SOA’s inherent capabilities for flexibility, responsiveness, and reuse with a scalable and sophisticated data integration technology that makes data available as a service, or data services. With a data services technology in the mix, IT organizations can look to maximize the business value of their extensive investments in SOA by ensuring the availability of holistic and accurate information at the speed of business.

Right-Time Availability of Enterprise Data Is Key to Agility
If we look around, we can see that powerful market forces such as globalization, mergers and acquisitions, regulatory compliance, fierce competition, tight operational budgets, and increased demand for improved customer service are pushing businesses to become more agile. To deliver increased business agility, enterprise IT organizations have been consistently trying to build infrastructures capable of flexibility, responsiveness, and reuse. However, the real question to ask is whether the infrastructure is supplying the data the business needs, and when, where, and how it needs it to help the company stay agile and competitive. Can the IT infrastructure handle all the complexity of enterprise data?

Holistic, accurate, and timely business-critical information is the lifeblood of any enterprise and the key driver for any business looking to gain, maintain, and grow the customer’s business and trust. To drive competitive advantage in today’s dynamic environments, businesses are increasingly trying to leverage all their information to support mission-critical applications such as consolidation of customer data to support a call center and delivery of forecasts for supply chain operation optimizations. Additionally, businesses are adopting industry standards like SWIFT in the financial services industry, ACORD in insurance, and HL7 in healthcare to exchange information with their partners. These scenarios will require all forms of enterprise data – structured unstructured, or semi-structured – be constantly accessed, manipulated, and used by more users through more applications, exactly when needed, be it batch, near real-time or real-time.

Thus, businesses need to be able to leverage all their enterprise data, holistically, accurately, and at the right time to gain business advantage. So IT organizations are looking for a scalable and flexible data integration technology that can complement its existing infrastructure investment and seamlessly handle any form of data, eliminate the complexity of the data integration “hairball,” and deliver timely data for efficiently responding to changing business demands. With a sophisticated and flexible enterprise information management strategy that treats data as a strategic asset and effectively exploits all the information contained in various silos spread across the enterprise, businesses can significantly increase their agility.

The Current SOA Landscape
As we’ve seen in the previous section, the ability to use up-to-date information in reducing time-to-market and increasing the speed of rolling out new and differentiated functionality for competitive advantage is what the modern enterprise is all about. However, developing and maintaining the right infrastructure to support these capabilities is crucial to enabling enterprises to achieve business agility.

As the first step towards agility, businesses need to leverage existing and new applications, business processes, and data in their mission-critical functions such as finance, supply chain, and customer management. In many organizations, well over 50% of the IT budget is devoted to building and maintaining points of integration among these systems. CIOs and IT managers are constantly confronted with the following challenges:

• High cost of IT development, deployment, and maintenance
• Poor IT infrastructure flexibility in meeting new business demands
• Inconsistent, inaccurate business data across the enterprise

Integrating fragmented applications is a big challenge facing IT and business, with tangible business implications. Business agility increasingly depends on a global view of customers, suppliers, products, and partners — an ideal not achievable without integration.

SOA has emerged as the leading technology for enabling a new generation of more flexible and cost-effective IT solutions. SOA offers a highly flexible layer of abstraction for delivering the following compelling business benefits:

• Flexibility of application and business process integration
• Reuse of business logic, existing IT assets, and skill-sets
• Reduction of vendor lock-in and hence, project complexity

SOA provides an elegant solution for IT to deal with the complexity of application integration in the enterprise. As shown in Figure 1 the current SOA landscape consists of delivering an effective abstraction layer for dealing with application integration using technologies such as Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), Business Process Management (BPM), and Enterprise Service Buses (ESB).

However, to enable agility in the enterprise efficiently, the underlying IT infrastructure must also support the right-time provisioning of holistic and accurate data that lies fragmented all across the enterprise. Implementers that embark on an SOA path quickly realize that SOA presents the following data-centric challenges that can’t be handled by their SOA platform providers:

• Heterogeneous data silos distributed across the enterprise and beyond
• Inconsistent and constantly changing data structures
• Poor data quality that is often difficult to measure or monitor
• Lack of agreement or visibility (single-view) into critical information assets

Information being the key to business agility, it’s critical that the application and business process layers can access holistic and accurate data when it’s desired, wherever it resides, in whatever form is required, consistently and accurately.

Thus, the payoff for SOA as the enabler of business agility in the enterprise will be great, if implemented with upfront emphasis on right-time data integration.