SOA repositories pave the way for financial mergers

We've been speculating that SOA and integration proponents would be kept very busy with all the shotgun weddings and all other manner of turmoil going on within the financial services sector.  ZDNet colleague Dana Gardner has just released a discussion with Harry Karr and Hemesh Yadav, IT architects at Wachovia, who talk about integration challenges as their organization gets absorbed into Wells Fargo.

Dana observed that "managing and consolidating data from various systems of record may create multiple information systems that may 'disagree' about the same piece of information. Using SOA and repositories effectively, however, can pave the way for harmonious data integration and service mappings across these critical systems. Getting your systems-of-record act together in conjunction with enterprise repository solutions provides more flexibility for change and disruptions -- challenges not unheard of in today's tough economy."

Yadav explained how an enterprise service repository can very effectively pave the path of integration. "If you don't have a common place to store and keep the information in very organized way, if you don't have a single repository and you don't have a good taxonomy to classify those services, even though you have a single enterprise solution, it doesn't really make you very productive.... if you build an enterprise repository and implement a single enterprise metamodel, it will be very easy to classify, store, access, and understand data."