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What are Enterprise Mashups and Why Do We Need Them in the Enterprise?
By John Crupi
Gathering data points together for decision-making purposes has historically been addressed by data warehouses and business intelligence tools. But in today’s networked business world, information is fluid. It changes by the minute and executives often need to make industry-changing decisions based on that information. And the answer is often a low-tech cut-and-paste type of solution. Needless to say, this approach isn’t optimal.
Enter one of Web 2.0’s hottest technologies: the enterprise mashup. Enterprise mashups put dynamic information services in the hands of those who need them most. This article will discuss some of the finer details of what an enterprise mashup is (and isn’t) and discuss a few practical use cases from enterprise mashup early adopters.
Defining an Enterprise Mashup
Everyone seems to have a gut "feeling" for mashups. And many of us have played with the proverbial "Chicago apartment locator." But defining an enterprise mashup is another story. Wikipedia describes a mashup (sans "enterprise") as "a Web site or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience."
While it’s a good start, the Wikipedia definition ignores those thorny issues inherent in every enterprise, like security, governance, compliance, and integration. Connecting your SAP ERP data with your Oracle/Siebel CRM data and third-party demographic information while maintaining single sign-on through your global LDAP server is not the same kind of problem as mapping apartments for rent in Chicago.
A more enterprise-relevant definition of a mashup would be "a user-centric micro-integration of Web-accessible data." While short, this definition contains a number of important points worth considering:
- “User-centric” - Mashups are always intended user consumption and are often created by the users themselves, not the by black-box back-end integration systems such as ESB, BPM, BPEL, etc. Without this guiding principle, we are merely sending the users back to IT for more development.
- “Micro-integration” - Think of a user taking data from multiple sources and copying it into Excel. As these users typically deal with small amounts of knowledge-oriented information (as opposed to IT-managed applications that typically deal with large amounts of transactional information), these are called “micro-integrations.”
- “Web-accessible” - Mashups are best created from standardized data formats such as WSDL, REST and RSS, which we summarize here as "Web-accessible." In other words, our data sources shouldn’t require too much manipulation for the user to make sense of it.
It is important to note that this describes what an enterprise mashup is but not its usage. That is left to the user, whether that user is an intelligence analyst performing an evaluation of a terrorist hotspot or a securities trader completing an analysis of an interesting investment opportunity. More importantly, the way a user interacts with a mashup makes it distinct from IT-centric integrations. Users dynamically create and interact with mashups. The net effect is that IT doesn’t prescribe the integration, they only need to govern it.
This definition can also help define what a mashup isn’t. It isn’t business process management (BPM) as we aren’t trying to address long-term human workflow issues. Mashups are executed in seconds and don’t have human-interface breakpoints in them. It isn’t enterprise information integration (EII). Mashups aren’t trying to address semantic issues through ontologies and such. It isn’t an enterprise service bus (ESB). Mashups are often constructed by the users themselves (not IT) and almost always are delivered to other users (not other applications). It certainly isn’t business intelligence. We don’t need a data warehouse to begin our mashing. Sure, there are a few overlapping characteristics with these technologies, but a mashup, when done in its proper form, is none of these things.
The Value of Enterprise Mashups
Now that we’ve defined an enterprise mashup, let’s turn our attention to the value of enterprises mashup. This question can (and should!) be considered from two perspectives: the business users and the IT folks.
A great example the value of a mashup for business users can be found in the financial services industry. When a company applies for a bond rating, the ratings agency must be able to pull up the companies' current financial information, third-party ratings reports, account history, the current rate information, and many other kinds of information that help put together a complete picture of that enterprises. Without those pertinent details the transaction cannot take place.
During a recent survey, JackBe asked 247 enterprise mashup planners and users to "describe the business problem Enterprise Mashups will address for you." The business-oriented responses included "correlate fluctuating commodity costs across various product groups and markets," "link real-time B2B buying data and commodity rate card with communication portal," and "combine client information requests with available knowledge and personnel resources," and "create real-time performance/compliance executive dashboards."
From an IT perspective, mashups can add value to a number of existing enterprise technologies. Mashups can make portals more dynamic. Mashups can simplify the development of rich Internet applications (RIAs). And by delivering services to end-users, mashups can greatly enhance the utility and ROI of service-oriented architectures (SOAs). A few interesting responses from our enterprise mashup survey included "storage/network resource management" and "GIS/disaster information management."
It is worth noting that even this short list synopsis of use cases represents quite a broad spectrum of opportunities across an enterprise. And these examples reinforce the basic proposition of a mashup: IT establishes a secure, governed framework for mashing and then hands the mashup to the business user. We aren’t introducing an improvement to existing information technologies, but an entirely new, dynamic way to harness the shifting information stream available to business users today. And that’s why we mash: it can make our business stronger, more agile, and have a real impact on the corporate bottom line.
About the Author:
John Crupi is CTO of JackBe, a provider of enterprise mashup software.For information about the company, go to www.jackbe.com.
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