Mashups Meet the Enterprise

While looking at mashups and thinking about all that we're learning from our projects, I started to think about how what we have learned could be used in the Enterprise. Mashups are an easy low cost means to pull data together and they are a great integration opportunity. I searched the internet and found there are some greaet ideas out there. When visiting soamag.com I felt they had powerful examples. They are listed below.

• A portfolio manager making decisions based on mashing internal analysis data combined with Web-based financial and news data,
• Medical researchers extending their collaborative efforts by comparing and joining public research compendiums (such as Pubmed, www.pubmed.org) with internal research databases.
• A sales executive enhancing quarterly forecasting by joining local spreadsheet-based estimates with corporate application services like receivables and support history.
• A finance manager using aggregated, filtered, and combined data from across divisional accounting instances for intermediate or mid-term compliance and financial reporting summaries.
• A product manager connecting near-term production plans with real-time commodity prices to enhance production and purchasing decisions.
• A project manager establishing a sharable 'management view' of project deliverables, open issues, and personnel billing.

The examples above would probably require some reengineering on the workflow or process side of the organization but in many cases it is necessary, especially given the pressures to save money and run businesses more efficiently and effectively. The above examples show how extremely productive a person can be by combining pieces of information as a mashup. This will make mashup developers extremely valuable and in high demand as more corporations move in this direction.

Another point I found while surfing around on this topic is the potential change in the role of IT. In a Forbes.com article Don Woods, CTO and Founder of Evolved Media, highlights that IT resources will be more like chemists watching the reaction as users develop their mashups. One example is if a user develops a mashup that adds a load to the network then IT staff should step in. IT staff should also support the development of mashups by adding their skill set for helping developers through inefficiencies.

Being in an IT role in a large corporation myself, I don't foresee this kind of activity taking shape as a whole any time soon. You saw how hard it was to turn the Titanic! It would take serious overhaul or process obliteration and of course, support from the top down to ensure adoption. Additionally, the business culture would need to change as well. Like stated earlier, the drive to run more effieciently and penny pinch may force large corporations to take a closer looks as they search for ideas to be more productive in these tough economic times. Mashups are great opportunity for them!