As architects of the enterprise data management suites spend a lot of energy talking about concepts and frameworks such as SOA, EDA, MDA, and SCA. In times of increasing complexity and with a desire to get projects completed on time and within budget, sometimes the most important part of any architecture is forgotten - the people using it! [Simon Guest]. It is truly a paradox of sorts! While the applications are required to handle increasing amount of complexity, they are required to cater to more and more users or stakeholders outside the core domain - making the information simpler, palatable and comprehensive… snapshots or summarized views, drilling down to layers of details underneath.
Today as the industry standard for data architecture is going through radical changes, from ‘closed, isolated chunks of data that do not communicate to each other’ to a harmonious ecosystem with ubiquitous end to end data flow, how does this affect the human who works with these mountains of data.

Successful service oriented solutions depend upon both service delivery and the ability to consume services in a rich and meaningful way. Service consumption needs to be contextual, mapping to the natural workflow of employees, customers and partners. To that end, an integrated User Experience spanning smart clients, rich clients, lightweight Web applications and mobile devices enables service consumption by the broadest possible audience.
–SOA & Business Process, MSDN Web Resources

So in the age of SOA, what attains critical importance…aggregation of content, flexibility in access, or unrestricted and unified control? If all of these are true, then it could have remarkable impact on the enterprise application user’s overall experience just as much. Treating reliability and system performance as given (as they constitute the back bone of any user experience at any point of time), there are a few more critical factors like low latency of information, interoperability, and ability to share and reuse. The web 2.0 philosophy impacting Enterprise Data Architectures seems like a somewhat predictable future course! But does that bring in more pain than the present scenario, where the number of information overheads run amuck, compliance guidelines clash with each other or complex business processes need to be quickly installed, configured and monitored (and interlinked)!!! Now that’s some task! With the advent of Service Oriented Architecture all these data would be extremely fluid and real time. May be a lot of ‘expertise’ would be built into the system, yet many user issues will remain to be addressed. See post Self Help Technologies - Bane or Boon.

There will be interesting discussions on the IA of the Enterprise Data Management, popularly known as EA.

The goal of enterprise architecture is to break down information silos and allow information to flow between the business units and business processes. Needless to say, it’s a practice, with a formal methodology and various styles. - The IT Business Edge Blog

From the perspective of information architecture, however, depending on compartmentalization and self-containment is not a complete solution. In the short term, separating items in this way helps manage some of the user experience complexity. Over the long term, it results in significant weaknesses, e.g. self-contained portlets cannot be combined easily to address the need for larger and more flexible communication, beyond the single chunk of information. Portlets are a one-size-fits-all solution to the many-sizes-at-the-same-time problem. The goal of a dashboard is to synthesize disparate information, at multiple levels of granularity and size, into meaningful packages that can be shared among leaders, each with their own perspectives.
- Joe Lamantia. Read the full article.

Undoubtedly, there would be new directions emerging from grounds of practice and design iterations of Enterprise Data Management in the age of SOA and web 2.0, what would be even more interesting to see, is how ‘The New Users’ of these information adopts to the new architecture.

Unfortunately, the new generation of knowledge workers won’t have a lot of patience with corporate IT. As BI guru Neil Raden put it in a recent IT Business Edge interview, imitating his son, “I’m playing a 3-D video strategy game with four people in China I don’t even know, while I’m downloading data to my iPod and answering messages in Yahoo Messenger. Are you going to tell me I can’t have a report for three months because it has to go through QA?” - Mike Stevens. Read the full article.