The opposite end to the percolating process anti-pattern this is the one where people assume that data is the centre of the universe.
Effect
With this anti-pattern you see data being driven as the centre of everything, services are all related to data processing and the first set of services being defined are about "key" data objects in the organisation. The actual actions and capabilities aren't captured its all about the data so the Customer service has a series of CRUD methods on it, but nothing that captures how a new customer is really added to the organisation. The impact of this is that it becomes an abstraction above the database but can lead to data silos being created, it can also lead to very inflexible architectures especially where these data services try to include both the "live" and in-process data as well as the post transactional data.
These architectures match nicely to reporting systems but badly to active goal or process oriented areas of the business.
Cause
The cause is pretty simple, its because people have started to do SOA from a Data Oriented perspective and not noticed the difference between the letter S and the letter D.
Resolution
The resolution is pretty simple. Keep the data services as a post transactional base for data, effectively these become the reference data for your systems. Then do a proper mapping of the business services and use these data services as support services and to help communication between different areas of the business, for "live" data keep it local to the service doing the processing and only submit back to the support data services once processing has completed.
Technorati Tags: SOA, Service Architecture
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