About the importance of linking SOA and MDM together…
Gartner’s Andrew White recently posted an entry entitled “When is SOA, DOA? When it’s without MDM?” (see post http://blogs.gartner.com/andrew_white/2008/12/09/when-is-soa-doa-when-its-without-mdm/) In it, he discussed the importance of linking your MDM strategy to your SOA strategy. However, during his customer reference calls for the Magic Quadrant for Master Data Management of Product Data this summer, he found that only 2 out of the 45 customers had connected their MDM strategy to their SOA strategy. While not a suprise, he views this as a major weakness that can undermine a SOA initiative.
Oracle produced a white paper a while ago (http://www.oracle.com/master-data-management/mdm-foundation-for-soa-white-paper.pdf), entitled “MDM as a Foundation for SOA” and David Butler and Jeff Pollock wrote an article for SOA Magazine this summer discussing the same topic.
After reading these, Andrew updated his blog highlighting this (see post http://blogs.gartner.com/andrew_white/2008/12/18/vendor%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%9cget%e2%80%9d-the-link-between-mdm-and-soa/) and called out Oracle’s understanding of this linkage!
Andrew writes “that the extract is well written, and in fact includes a nice, and more importantly, simple business example, of how MDM and SOA work together.”