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Preparing for a webinar next week on Enterprise Mash-ups gave me an opportunity to ponder the subject of mash-ups at more length. Frankly, my first reaction to the term was that renaming existing concepts with cool Web 2.0 jive was what you needed to do to be cool these days. “Composite applications” just wasn’t a term Web 2.0ers would use. But after more research, thought, and reflection, I have come to a new appreciation for the potential power of mash-ups in the enterprise.

I distinguish mash-ups from composite applications in the following way. Composite applications are composed of a collection of, or orchestration of different components or services that can be common and reusable across different business functions. Examples are accessing information in different systems on customers, products, inventory, pricing, or doing common functions such as pricing, credit checks, loan calculations, etc. A composite application can be a completely automated business process or function.

While mash-ups are comprised of different components or services, they have additional characteristics that make them a distinct class of composite application. Mash-ups always include a user interface. In fact, what mash-ups are all about is the rich, interactive, multi-media user interface that can seamlessly combine different capabilities. Such as: Google maps linked to customer addresses. Another distinct feature of mash-ups is the user interface can be customized. Information can be visualized in different formats, including tables and graphs. The potential of mash-ups in the enterprise is to provide an SOA approach to desktop productivity, by providing access to enterprise data in a managed and consistent manner. This approach addresses the issue of inaccuracies in desktop spreadsheets due to out-of-data downloaded data.

So as I now see it, enterprise mash-ups hold real potential benefits for organizations. From the executive level, it enables faster, easier, cheaper access to information, enabling managers to make better, quicker decisions based on more timely and accurate information.

From an IT point of view it gives IT control and manageability over IT assets while providing end users with customizable reporting capabilities. This makes it easy for end users to create exactly want. In fact they can usually do it themselves more easily than they can explain to IT what they want. They’re actually more satisfied doing it themselves, and IT no longer has to do it. It’s a win-win all around.

So despite the fact that I would not identify myself as a Web 2.0er looking for some cool new lingo, my original skepticism about mash-ups has transformed into a new appreciation as to their potential in the enterprise.

Tune into the webinar and join the discussion on Mar 28th at 2:00 ET.

Posted by bethgb at 03:51 PM in Industry Trends | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us