SOA: What It Is, and What It Means to Business Intelligence

Service oriented architectures (SOAs) are rapidly becoming key initiatives among many IT departments today.  As more and more SOAs are implemented, these new infrastructures will have a massive impact on how business intelligence environments are deployed and utilized across an organization.

SOAs leverage powerful and reusable application components – also known as “services” – that are distributed and shared to create business systems that are more flexible and more easily integrated.  As a result, databases, software solutions, and other technology resources can more readily interconnect and interact with each other.  The deployment of a service oriented architecture can offer many advantages.  For example, their reusability can dramatically reduce IT overhead costs, and simplify and accelerate application development and administration.

But, what does this mean for today’s business intelligence systems?

As the need for real-time BI becomes more critical – particularly when it comes to operational reporting – companies are recognizing the need to eliminate “stand alone” reporting and analysis solutions, and more tightly and seamlessly incorporate those capabilities into the core application environment.  Service oriented architectures make this possible by providing a means for more effectively eliminating redundant, inaccurate, or siloed information (without the use of data warehouses, marts, and stores), as well as a more robust and efficient architecture for data movement and access.  And, perhaps most importantly, SOAs facilitate the kind of event-driven environments that create true real-time enterprise information visibility – dynamically “pushing” data to end users instantly when certain conditions occur, specific criteria are met, or critical issues arise.

Because SOA is still considered “immature” among many experts, the keys to successfully incorporating BI into a service oriented architecture are still being discovered.  In fact, according to a recent Ventana Research report, only one-third of IT personnel surveyed believe they have the knowledge and skill required to properly implement service-based BI.

However, there are some tips to enable more effective convergence of these two technologies:

• Identify the appropriate technical resources to oversee and support the initiative, and ensure they acquire the general knowledge of SOA concepts and technologies needed to develop a comprehensive architecture for the creation, control, and consumption of BI services. 
• Work with a vendor who utilized the latest SOA technologies, such as Web services, .NET, and J2EE, instead of older SOA-style components, which are often proprietary and highly complex.
• Create a detailed reference diagram that identifies all technology components that are affected by the BI solution, including all legacy databases, business applications, and their relationships to each other.
• Build and deploy SOA components for reporting, dashboard presentation, data quality management and integration, and master data management.  These will serve as the foundation of your SOA-based BI infrastructure.   

Ensure seamless integration of the SOA and BI components in areas that “share” data delivery responsibility such as metadata repositories, business rules engines, and enterprise data structures.