Shared data services: an architectural approach

The growing need for enterprises to have instantaneous access and visibility to data is fuelling the need for enterprise data integration. An enterprise having fragmented systems on varied technologies is a very commonly occurring scenario. In this paper we take a business case scenario with heterogeneous systems and describe a non-intrusive service oriented approach for achieving enterprise wide data integration. We take a holistic view of the problem statement and propose an end to end architectural approach that encompasses the ETL activities to the shared data access layer. This meta-data based architecture is highly extensible requiring minimal change in existing applications and business process yet adhering to the long term architectural strategy. We also propose the creation of fine grained shared business services which are supported by underlying shared data services.