Another view: SOA is like a mosquito, spreading viral data

Just as the Internet has shown itself to be a speed-of-light carrier of rumors, gossip, and misinformation, so can service oriented architecture within an organization.

I just came across new book titled "Viral Data in SOA: An Enterprise Pandemic," written by Neal Fishman, program director for information forensics within IBM's Information Management group, which highlights the risks that emerge as more and more applications are interconnected across and between enterprises.

On the cover of the book is a mosquito.  A mosquito's claim to fame is that it can pick up viruses and bacteria from any type of organism, and deliver the payload to any other type of organism on the planet. A human and a deer and a bird may not have much in common, but they can all share the same diseases.

Is SOA, then, a mosquito that can deliver payloads of bad data (what Fishman calls "viral data") all across the enterprise -- pandemic style -- before it can be stopped?

Fishman points out that misinformation and bad data have been haunting and hobbling organizations -- not to mention entire societies -- since the dawn of time. Nowadays, of course, information travels at the speed of light, and SOA -- enabling interoperability between all types of applications -- becomes the "host" carrier. As he puts it:

"Overall, viral data in SOA has the capacity to become an enterprise pandemic and disable a company. Service-oriented solutions that incorporate interoperability, reusability, layering of abstractions, and loose coupling serve as perfect hosts to propogate misinformation. That is the knife's edge of SOA."

As often discussed at this site, data is often a last considering in SOA planning, but SOA really won't function properly if it's delivering bad data.

What can organizations do to control the proliferation of viral data across SOA-enabled infrastructures? Fishman makes these recommendations for a multi-pronged approach to taking the "viruses" out of data before it infects the entire business.

• A reference model for moving data
• Methods by which to assess data
• Capture of data provenance
• Use of meta-driven coding techniques
• Use of abstract model
• Use of contextual views
• Continuous monitoring
• An appropriate data architecture
• Data governance

The last item on Fishman's list, data governance, fits very neatly into SOA discussions, because SOA governance ensures that the enterprise is behind the effort. Likewise, data governance helps ensure that the correct version of data is being deployed within the architecture.