Will Enterprise Mashups “mashup” the Enterprise?
I recently came across a very nice video explaining about enterprise mashups (Watch Video). All of us in IT know those mission critical projects with tight schedules, last minute problem solving with moving goalposts and suffering from the dreaded scope creep. So the image of having the users doing their stuff on their own while I’m relaxing in an armchair with a nice glass of wine is quite appealing. But will Enterprise Mashups get me there?
We are all familiar with Web 2.0 mashups from having some information e. g. office/hotel/customer locations being displayed in Google maps on the company’s website. (Funnily enough, this is the only example you’ll find in the mashup presentations given and I don’t want to embarrass my colleagues by coming up with a fresh one. But truly there loads out there.)
So, a mashup in a web page blends “own data” with data coming from external sources to present a personalised view for the user. By doing this, we have magically created additional business value. This is expressed by the “mashup formula” of 1 + 1 = 4.
With this in mind, corporate people tend to start thinking “Why go the long way and build all these well defined services in the backend and have these painful corporate EAI programs, when we can just as easily mashup the information at the front end … for a tenth of the cost and the hassle?”.
Back at University we were seduced by the idea of using 4GL, where anybody could create software by simply using a graphical editor and “just” define the business logic behind everything. Yet, I still ask myself why are we so tool-prone? I certainly understand why the companies selling tools are mind blocked in that way! As we at Infosys sell the brain and not the tool, so I believe it’s neither the hammer nor the nail that builds a house but the intellect and the proficiency of the person using them.
But mashups certainly are an intriguing concept. It is not that they offer something otherwise impossible but that they offer a new approach that makes us think of innovative solutions for our business problems - just as Web 1.0 has.
Given time, there will be common standards for questions as essential to mashups as “what is a widget?”. In time, we will find a way to describe the APIs - or rather the services - that mashups provide, and how to access them. We will know how to relate to similar concepts like JSR168 or WSRP. And maybe after some time I won’t have to complain about my train travel 3rd party iPhone app that stopped working because the operator just changed the web interface.
So mashups will give us new ways to integrate and present corporate data more easily, timely and with far less effort. This will certainly enable us to be a lot more flexible and adaptive to challenges in a very dynamic world. That is if we “just” go and define feeds of information and types of applications (widgets) to be used. As if it were so easy! So my belief is that at the end of the day the challenge to enterprise information management is still the ability to define and model processes as well as business and information domains.
How about you? What kind of mashups do you imagine for your company? What is it that you would like to see? What sources of information (internal and external) would you like to use? Will you be able to mash the client locations along your business trips with the nearest golf courses or will someone ask “Where is the money”? Should I finally get a decent job outside software development or am I just mashup?
