SAP MDM: Linchpin for SOA

By Sam Sliman
President, Optimal Solutions Integration

The consensus among industry pundits is that master data management (MDM) is vital to realizing the promise of enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA). According to Gartner, “You won't get the business agility from SOA unless you build an enterprise information management layer first […] You will waste your investment in SOA unless you have enterprise information that SOA can exploit." Forrester points out that, "SOA by itself does nothing to address the question of how data should be managed within this architecture,” and Forrester analyst Ray Wang underscores the fundamental importance of MDM to any business intelligence (BI) initiative: “If you really wanted your BI to work you’d solve the master data issue.”

By now the concept and purpose of enterprise SOA is well understood-break monolithic applications into reusable, discrete ‘enterprise services’ which reside on the network and can be drawn upon to quickly and cost-effectively build loosely coupled applications that satisfy immediate business needs. The value of SOA shines forth through rapid business process innovation and transformation. Over time SOA also increases ROI and lowers TCO of present and future SAP investments.

The bulk of today’s MDM market, according to Forrester, consists of customer data integration (CDI) and product information management (PIM) initiatives. To be sure, MDM elevates the value of CDI and PIM by allowing these applications to work off the same master data, reducing data quality and redundancy concerns and enabling more effective data governance practices. After-the-fact analysis and reporting in the data warehouse also is an immediate benefit of MDM. But these early MDM forays are typically siloed initiatives and have little relation to SOA.

SOA, at bottom, is about integration, and this integration is typically envisioned as happening at the application layer, with myriad enterprise applications drawing upon bits of each other’s service-enabled functionality in real time to transform existing or create new business processes that drive operational efficiencies and provide greater visibility across the enterprise.

As SOA moves beyond the conceptual level and into real-word deployment, the preeminent role of MDM becomes abundantly clear. Without a single source of accurate, consolidated, harmonized and centrally managed data, the efficacy of any new or improved business process which is dependent on an SOA-based application is severely limited. It is essential that a well-designed MDM model be in place to weave all the various application data together into an accurate, complete, and actionable picture. It is well known that SAP NetWeaver MDM is well suited for this purpose.

What is perhaps less well known is that SAP MDM’s SOA value extends well beyond providing enterprise-wide data consolidation, harmonization and central management. Because it is built on the NetWeaver platform, the technical enabler of SOA, SAP MDM also holds open the possibility for data itself to be exposed as a service.

The implications of this ‘data-as-a-service’ capability, or ‘data visualization’ as it is called, are profound. In essence, coupling MDM with enterprise SOA allows for a fast and radical transformation of the information supply chain within an enterprise. Exposing data as a service significantly increases the data’s operational and transactional value, which in time will spur the development of a virtually infinite array of industry-specific composite applications capable of feeding line-of-business workers the information they need in real time to make better, faster, smarter decisions.

Determining precisely what data can be exposed as an enterprise service, and how best to cobble together into a composite application bits of functionality from disparate applications remains a formidable challenge. But what is certain right now is that SAP NetWeaver MDM stands fast as the linchpin for unleashing the full future value of enterprise SOA.