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At Your Service: Data Dividends in an SOA
Those are the core data integration components in an SOA. Now let's examine the services and benefits that they deliver for an SOA - data profiling, cleansing, transformation, movement, and auditing:

• Data Profiling: Data profiling is the process of assessing and understanding the content, quality, and structure of enterprise data. It is an essential step in reconciling semantic differences in common business vocabularies such as customer, address, and product that vary among applications, and which, if unaddressed, result in contradictory information across the enterprise.
• Data Cleansing: Once data is profiled, a data integration platform can execute data cleansing functions to ensure the validity and consistency of information. It standardizes name, address, and other values, and resolves missing data fields, parses data elements, and corrects poorly formatted or conflicting data.
• Data Transformation: Data transformation services enable data to be transformed from one form to another to allow reconciliation between data elements residing in different information sources. The transformation services leverage prebuilt and customized mappings that take into account complex data hierarchies and relationships.
• Data Movement: Data integration offers flexible mechanisms for "right-time" data delivery in an SOA, including high-volume bulk data movement, near real-time capabilities, data federation, and changed data capture that handles only information that has been updated to accelerate load times and minimize operational impact.
• Data Auditing: Data integration provides in-depth lineage of data - when it was changed, how, by whom, and across which applications - to enable the auditing, reporting, and analysis that is essential to meeting the demands of legislated regulations and internal/external auditors.

Where Do We Go from Here?
SOA may still be in its early phases, but the time is right to take a hard look at data-related business objectives and IT resources in your service-oriented architecture blueprint. One key to success is an iterative approach that focuses first on targeted projects with quantifiable business value that are relatively easy to implement. SOA, after all, is a matter of architecture, and no organization is going to rearchitect its systems overnight.

By implementing a data integration platform at the ground level, you can ready your IT systems to fully leverage that most valuable of business assets - data - without reengineering, hand coding, and having to worry about data quality problems down the line. Plus, you'll never worry about receiving another response that says, "You forgot the data."

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