Master Data Management (MDM) -- Rethink

On a beautiful evening as friends , we transitioned in to the topic of Master Data Maintenance. We had an interesting conversion – Everybody shared their experience on this topic. Thought it would be great to write and summarize few thoughts that came across.
Starting from basic Employee, Material, Customer and Vendor Master in a small company, Master data can reach to a very complex situation like ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) driven MES (Manufacturing Execution System), Recipe to Inspection Characteristic Master. After a brief intro, let us see what it can affect in a project /implementation short to long term, if not designed with vision there will be impact on
Cost to Company
Project Implementation timeline
Application and interface behavior
Future design strategy
EAI strategy
Data Management strategy
Post Go-live support strategy
Data security
the list goes on – Either going with a tool or a home grown solution - Looking at the list, it seems to be a big deal for sure.
If your company has already implemented MDM strategy, its important to look back and see where the current implementation lack in governance and implement corrective measures ASAP, which will cover the company's overall cost. If you are in the process of implementing a MDM strategy, it would be great opportunity to look the list and make necessary investment initially to reduce the cost in future.

MK -- Solutions Architects @ Quadrobay

MOA vs. SOA

Message Oriented Architecture (MOA)
An architecture for exchanging documents where there is no implied semantics about what should be done with a received document.

• What does this definition mean? It basically means that MOA is for broad-scale information sharing. An example would be stock ticks. A financial services firm will have a MOA backbone to distribute changes in stock values to any application that is interested. It doesn't dictate what someone does once they know a stock has changed - it just informs them that it has happened.
  
• By this definition, MOA is primarily used for data synchronization and event notification. As a result MOA would often be pub/sub based.
  

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
In contrast is about execution of business processes through services.

• You are distributing documents with a purpose - you don't send out an order "just because" you send it out because it is to be processed or cancelled. With an SOA the consumer is interacting with a provider for a well defined purpose (e.g. processing an order). The end result is that SOA rarely leverages pub/sub - SOA is more focused on "directed messaging" (messages directed at a specific target for a specific purpose).
  

DPM - The Business Architects @ Quadrobay

SOAP

SOAP or Simple Object Access Protocol is an XML-based object invocation protocol that defines the use of XML and HTTP to access services, objects and servers in a platform-independent manner. SOAP was originally designed for communication of distributed applications over HTTP, and through corporate firewalls, as a framework for expressing application semantics. It did this by providing a modular packaging model and encoding mechanisms for encoding data within modules. SOAP can be applied in a variety of systems ranging from messaging systems to RPC. SOAP does not itself define any application semantics or a programming model, per se. SOAP defines protocol bindings which describe how a message can be carried in HTTP messages either with or without the HTTP Extension Framework in a distributed computing environment.
Besides the traditional request-and-response messages SOAP is capable of facilitating rich message exchange patterns and broadcasting. However, using a binary data attachment for messaging is very complex while using SOAP, and so this is generally not an option which is feasible.

• SOAP uses an Internet application layer protocol as a transport protocol usually via HTTP/HTTPS (Or SMTP). Using SOAP over HTTP/HTTPS enables easier communication behind proxies and firewalls by using other remote execution technology and other distributed protocols like GIOP/IIOP or DCOM, which in themselves become very complex because of messaging filtration by firewalls.
  
• SOAP provides communication between two operating systems by using HTTP and XML. Due to HTTP and XML being available on all major operating system platforms, this provides an immediately accessible solution to getting different operating systems to communicate. SOAP is supported in DCOM, COM, Internet Explorer and Microsoft's Java implementations.
  
• Basically, SOAP is a stateless, one-way message exchange paradigm, (although more complex interaction patterns such as request/response, request/multiple responses etc., can be created using SOAP by combining these one-way exchanges with features provided by an underlying protocol and/or application-specific information.) SOAP provides a framework by which application-specific information may be conveyed in an extensible manner and has nothing to do with the semantics of any application-specific data conveyed through its application.
  
• Some of its uses are RPC, and communicating messages with platform-independent content. It is also widely used for implementing web services.
  

DPM - The Business Architects @ Quadrobay

WSDL

WSDL (Web Services Description Language) is a XML-based language for describing Web services that commonly includes the operations, the messages, the data types and the communication protocols used by the web services. The WSDL specifies the location of the web service and the operations (or methods) that the web service exposes. Initially, the WSDL 1.1 was submitted as a W3C Note by Ariba, IBM and Microsoft for describing services for the W3C XML Activity on XML Protocols in March 2001.

The WSDL defines services as collections of network endpoints that are referred to as ports. The main elements in a WSDL document include portType, message, types and bindings. The WSDL is extensible to allow description of the ports and their messages regardless of what message formats or network protocols are used to communicate. Currently, The WSDL (version 2.0) provides a model and an XML format for describing Web services.

DPM - The Business Architects @ Quadrobay

UDDI

Universal Description, Discover, and Integration (UDDI) standard is a global Internet list/registry of businesses based on XML. Its goal is to provide a platform-independent, open framework for transactions across the Internet. The UDDI is an open industry initiative that is sponsored by OASIS which is a non-profit, international consortium that creates interoperable industry specifications based on public standards such as XML and SGML.

• The UDDI facilitates the businesses to publish service listings and interact with each other and define how the services or software applications interact over the Internet. A UDDI business registration primarily includes the address, contact, and known identifiers, the industrial categorizations based on standard taxonomies and the technical specifications about the services exposed by the business.
  
• The UDDI is integrated into the Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) standard as a key component of the web services infrastructure.
  

DPM - The Business Architects @ Quadrobay

EAI

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is defined as the uses of software and computer systems architectural principles to integrate a set of enterprise computer applications.

EAI can be used for different purposes:

• Data (information) Integration: Ensuring that information in multiple systems is kept consistent. This is also known as EII (Enterprise Information Integration).
  
• Process Integration: Linking business processes across applications.
  
• Vendor independence: Extracting business policies or rules from applications and implementing them in the EAI system, so that even if one of the business applications is replaced with a different vendor's application, the business rules do not have to be re-implemented.
  
• Common Facade: An EAI system could front-end a cluster of applications, providing a single consistent access interface to these applications and shielding users from having to learn to interact with different applications
  

DPM - The Business Architects @ Quadrobay