Interface-based and coarsely grained

SOA is interface-based, so common messaging enables communications between services. Services interact using SOAP and XML to exchange data, parameters and processed results. For BI, the availability of the right communication protocols and open APIs is increasingly important because of the need to deliver BI to everything from mobile devices to enterprise search tools and other applications.

Finally, SOA is a good fit for BI because the services are coarsely grained, that is, defined at the business level rather than the application level. This reduces network traffic and simplifies integration. Coarsely grained services enable the reuse of these services across processes and applications, which is critical to efficient deployment of solutions.

Coarsely grained services are especially important for BI solutions considering the range of methods used to access information. A user needs to be able to quickly derive the same answer to a key business question whether that information is coming from a standard report or an ad hoc query, and regardless of whether the information was accessed through the BI application, from a mobile device or from within another application.

Key to achieving this in an efficient manner is using a common set of services built at the right level so there isn't too much chatter between services to increase lag time.

Coarsely grained services are also critical for enterprise BI to ensure solution agility. To deliver the wide range of BI capabilities across a variety of environments and reach all users requires an architecture that quickly adapts to change.

With a common set of coarsely grained services for all capabilities that have been purpose-built for a BI function, a solution can evolve quickly to new requirements. Once again, this is especially important when looking at a tool that needs to reach users who work in environments outside the traditional BI realm. The right SOA foundation ensures new technologies can quickly be made available to all capabilities, instead of introduced as capability-specific solutions that need to be built and maintained independently.

Organizations should insist on enterprise BI solutions based on SOA as a prerequisite for success. Using SOA's single set of standards-based, peer-to peer, purpose-built services and single, open API, lets IT take advantage of existing platforms, operating systems, hardware and security controls. This openness also means fewer moving parts to deploy and maintain, making for an efficient, reliable and agile performance solution across the enterprise.

For IT, this efficiency translates into ease of deployment, maintenance and change. For businesses, users can access data sources on a variety of platforms without inevitable infrastructure changes impacting their ability to obtain the information needed. The solution is up and running faster, business users have access to more information and they are not inconvenienced by back-end changes.

Hanniman is a senior product marketing manager at Cognos, an IBM company. She can be reached at jennifer.hanniman@ca.ibm.com.