Data Hubs Boost Business Integration

Computerworld - Here we go again -- circling back to a proven concept that has always been a good idea: the data hub.

Hub-and-spoke architectures are a common, practical design for integrating any complex set of linkages such as telephone networks, airline flight connections or distribution centers.

In similar fashion, data hubs minimize the spaghetti of point-to-point linkages between applications and provide key business process integration points in the enterprise.

So what's new? Finally, key suppliers and commercial products are emerging in this area, and we may not have to build these things from scratch anymore (see story).

If you haven't heard the term before, data hubs are part of your transaction-processing architecture. Data hubs are a practical way of integrating key data across multiple transaction-processing applications. Their purpose is to support operational integration across all or a subset of the enterprise. If they integrate the whole enterprise, they are sometimes called enterprise data hubs. Data warehouses perform the same data integration task but for decision-support purposes such as historical trend analysis.

What's a data hub?

What is a data hub? A data hub is organized around the integration of a single type of data, such as customer, product or order data, to be used across multiple systems. It's updated in near real time to provide access to current information for operational purposes. A data hub is therefore subject-oriented, integrated, updated on a regular basis (volatile) and contains the most recent view of the data (current-valued and not archival).

One type of data hub provides reference data used across multiple transaction systems. For example, a customer or product data hub can be used to support order processing, distribution and service. But data hubs can also be created for transaction data such as customer orders or supplier purchase orders that may be sourced from a distributed set of applications but still need to be integrated.

Most large corporations already have a few de facto data hubs. In the old days, they may have been called systems of record or master files. However, these legacy data hubs are typically not supporting the current operational integration needs of the enterprise because they were designed around very narrow integration requirements and not the entire enterprise.

Perhaps you have a customer data hub for sales, but not service or a part data hub for manufacturing but not engineering. These de facto, legacy data hubs are huge opportunities for the creation of enterprise data hubs when they are up for renewal.

Enterprise data hubs, at minimum, contain those