MDM vs. SOA…What takes priority in Mergers and Acquisitions?
In the ongoing economic mayhem, we have seen many small to even big companies are taken over by other big and bigger companies. This act of merging two companies leads to consolidating key business entities across companies so that the merged entity performs better and benefits from this merger and/or acquisition (M&A).
When it comes to customer data, we immediately start talking about customer experience, single version/truth of customer data across enterprise, 360o view of customer data, golden record etc. or alternatively a Master Data Management (MDM) Solution for Customer data. But what happens practically when it comes to a big activity like M&A? Everyone talks about MDM as a strategic solution but starts designing to put a more tactical solution using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to get through transition. They say that with tactical SOA, MDM would be overkill. I am sure they say this because they have a pressure from business to not mix strategies with transitions and instead focus on integration and maintain business continuity. What they end up with is exploiting SOA approach and developing point to point integrations while maintaining data silos.
I am not saying that SOA is not the right solution but I am also not saying that MDM should take a back seat in such high profile projects like M&A. Most companies believe that these two approaches are mutually exclusive tracks. After all, one focuses on architectural side and the other on information side. I was reading a blog on Gartner recently where Andrew White mentioned “MDM needs SOA and SOA needs MDM”. I agree with him that these two approaches are complimentary to each other and help organizations achieve strategic goals if planned and even developed in parallel.
It’s not like the past when business teams used to provide requirements to the technology team and waited in the wings for the delivery of an application. What we see now is that business teams have become partners in such delivery. They are fully involved in the planning, approach, and the ultimate delivery of the application. SOA is built on business processes so it becomes more relevant and necessary for SOA and MDM to go together.
