Woohoo! I Can Now Access Your Crap Data More Easily

With the growing popularity of enterprise mashups, more and more organizations are starting to service-enable their data sources, i.e. building web services on top of their data sources to enable access to their data. Unfortunately, most of them are not addressing their underlying data problems first before doing so. I've written about this before, talking about the need for an SOA data strategy. It still amazes me to see how many people out there still think that by slapping web services on top of their databases, amazing things will happen and their problems will be solved. All that will happen is that this will bring all their crappy data up front and center on some flashy AJAX-based mashup application. We've seen this before in the past with BI and reporting applications that used some of the more traditional data integration technologies. After the BI app is built, the end user realizes that she still can't do any real analysis because the data is crap.

soa, enterprise mashups, data strategy