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Current State of Data Management
In a recent article in the Data Administration Newsletter1 , Mehmet Orun, Principal Data Architect at a major US biotech company, deplores the current status of data management within the enterprise. In particular, he makes the following observations, based on discussions with his peers in the Data Management Association (DAMA).
data management organizations becoming smaller in size and budget as development groups grow larger
data management professionals lack involvement and influence over key development areas – for example XML schema design, review, and deployment.
This certainly accords with our own observations of data architecture and data management within large organizations. We’ve done a number of SOA maturity assessments and planning workshops for large organizations, both public and private sector, and we’ve seen how easily data management can be limited to being the official minders of the corporate database, with diminishing influence over a growing diversity of information systems and interactions.
Meanwhile we are hearing horror stories of organizations that are adopting perverse implementations of SOA without any proper notion of architecture – what we might call SO-minus-A. For example, enterprise architecture consultant Robert McIlree describes an organization that was using SOA infrastructure to replicate data into multiple data servers specific to particular applications 2. In other words, the service oriented infrastructure is used to support the existing application silos rather than transforming them. While this might conceivably make sense as a short-term tactical move within an architecturally planned stepwise transformation, it is difficult to see how even this could possibly work without extremely careful data management control.
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