Tuesday, August 23, 2005

Use RSS to Integrate Intra Company Data Sources Companies these days are on internet time. We need to get stuff done fast. There's not time to sit around and go through approval gates and endless design reviews and hardware requisition process committees. By that time our competitor will have already released a product and we are toast. Scavenge whatever skills and tools your group can find and get the job done. That's why any company that has been around for a while is a hive of different data sources. One group will create a tool to handle WhattyaCallits. Another group will create a tool to handle ThingyMaBobs. Every problem creates a new source of data. You think I am going to say that is bad, don't you? You think I am going to say everyone should have all their data in a well managed shared database so all the data is normalized into squeaky cleanness. Well I am not. Business is about solving problems. If everyone had to wait for the corporate data store to open up for business before they could do anything then nothing would ever get done. For the most part central databases are about turning people away, not making things happen. So people with a problem do what they need to to get the job done. Someone in their group may use access or they may make web site to solve their problem. Or they may hire a contractor to do the same thing. And yes, when that person leaves no one will have any idea how to extend the system or fix bugs. But is that worse than not getting the job done? I don't think so. Yet we would still like to get the data out for use by other systems. Islands of data eventually want to form land bridges. The marketing data over in department X needs to be joined somehow with the web data and the sales data from department Y. Ideally we would like a service interface to each data store so we could access the data programatically. Well that's not going to happen. The people who create one off projects aren't going to create a SOAP based access layer to their backend. What to do? I think RSS might be a way to hook together different data islands. RSS tools are becoming very common and easy to use now. If every data source became an RSS feed then programs could hook up to the RSS data feeds to resync and learn about changes. Obviously this isn't low latency real-time kind of stuff, but it doesn't really need to be for most problem spaces. I'm pretty much just going to suck up the data into my own systems anyway. I don't need the data to be actionable in its RSS form. I just need some sort of XML name space with a data format that I can parse and use. If all the data sources are connected by RSS feeds then we've achieved an uncoupling of systems. Different parts of a company can feel free to develop the systems they feel will get the job done for them, yet the data won't be locked away either. Different parts of a company can evolve at the speed they need to in order to solve the problems they are facing without the corporate data bottleneck. It's not an ideal solution, I understand. But it just might work. comment[] 1:31:59 PM

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