Campbell Craig :: The Irish Duck

Enterprise Mashups, do we really need them?

// February 27th, 2010 // web development

Over the last few months I have learned that a lot of my thoughts on Enterprise Mashups were wrong. As I consulted the company that invented the first Enterprise Mashup Platform, “Presto” they were certain that they had all of the right answers to the question of ‘what is an enterprise Mashup and what kind of value do they create?’.

Most cognoscenti consider their opinions to be relatively unassailable when it comes to the topic on which they are experts. So, as the saying goes, the first step in fixing a problem is realizing you have one. I knew that we didn’t have the best answers, so I set out on a journey to discover better ways to share the mashup story through definitions, use cases and the like. We set out on what I called a “mash-about” (named after the aboriginal “walk-about”).

I tried to simplify the definition as much as possible so I can focus on what I thought were the four most important elements:

• Secure – I’ve written about the common secure requirements for mashups before. Without this set of capabilities, you’ll never get past the enterprise front door.
• Visually rich – Mashups can certainly be published as a data service using a format like RSS or WSDL. But I’ve found that they more often end as visual representations (often personalized or customized by the mashup consumer) that lets users better understand the data and make informed decisions.
• Actionable – The dictionary defines “actionable” as “relating to or being information that allows a decision to be made or action to be taken”. We’re talking about data that a knowledge worker can understand and which doesn’t require lots of processing.
• Internal and external – Mashups provide aggregation and manipulation of information from many sources (inside and outside the firewall). Many people wrongly assume that they focus on one or the other when in practice they are typically a mix of both.

So, I gathered my thoughts to essentially define “WHY?” (do I or anyone else really need an Enterprise Mashup)?

I think poor decisions are often made because decision-makers do not have the right information at the right time. Sure, Enterprise Mashups deliver new insights and enable better decisions through personalized access to the right, real-time information for the specific problem at hand, but does everyone need one?