Being an Information Manager...

Architecture and Information Services

I strongly believe that most organisations today are mostly dealing in information and therefore - building a layer of 'information services' is something that should be considered when trying to build a sustainable and agile architecture.

What is the story of information services? Information services are a way of decoupling data from functionality. In the past this was already done by creating databases - but usually the databases were application specific. In the mind of most programmers there cannot be data without an application.

When applications started to grow and started overlapping, then the concept of shared data emerged - this happened at the end of the 'eighties' and suddenly people started to think about designing major data models. One of the most glorious attempts was the 'Epicentre' datamodel - designed by the Petrotechnical Open Software Corporation, an object relational database for the oil industry with more than 2000 tables. It was very clever, very flexible and very hard to implement. And therefore it was never a success.

Obviously these heroic attempts were doomed and with the growth of off-the-shelf applications we saw the rise of ETL tools (to get a grip on all the interfaces) And quickly after the rise of ETL, with the rise of the Internet, we saw a complete market growing of middleware solutions.
As information managers found out - it is also possible to create spagghetti with middleware solutions as well and now eight years after the millenium we are back at where we started - we are crying out to get more control on the information.

And this is where the information services story comes back again. If you put information at the center and 'wrap this up' as a service, using a canonical data model (a bit like the Epicentre data model, but then more pragmatic ...), then it is possible to reduce the complexity of your architecture. The data can be in various places (so don't think about large corporate data stores) and the middleware just 'knows' where to get it. The applications just 'shop' for data from the middle layer and the 'bus' is doing the work. Well this is where the complexity is - building the 'bus' is the hard work - since it requires

• rationalisation of data sources (agree where is the master)
• common definitions (or at least agree how to transform)
• routing (agree how the data flows)

And this is where we in IT are not good at - it is great to define a lot of new functionality, but to crawl through the sewers of data management is very hard. But if you want to succeed in getting control on your information centric entreprise, then think 'information services'!

Labels: architecture, middleware, SOA

posted by Evert Ruijs @ 12:04 PM