Since starting this blog back in November, I've asked this question of several vendors of enterprise mashup products, and the simple answer seems to be 'no'. The more nuanced answer boils down to 'no' as well, but vendors prefer to make it sound like a qualified 'yes' because let's face it, no one is going to sell a lot of mashup products if users aren't allowed to do mashups. So instead, vendors offer products that lock down some of the options, leaving users free to do mashups within clearly defined parameters. Here's how JackBe's John Crupi explained it to me in a January podcast interview:
"[You] make sure that you're hooked into the security and governance; and then you can put policy around what users can access, what data, and what type of mashups they can create ... what we have to do is, we lock down, essentially, the access to the data services, to be able to give that flexibility and innovation that you want to give to the business user."
Overall, the message seems to be that users can only be trusted to work with mashups in a protected environment. A whole ecosystem of products has grown up to help enterprise IT tame external data feeds and applications to make them fit for consumption inside the enterprise, or which help track and monitor what users are doing so that IT can maintain governance and oversight.
Even then, I wonder how many IT managers are prepared to leave business users to their own devices. Even with a limited set of options, it won't stop people rolling out their self-built applications without proper testing, or creating processes with unforeseen side-effects, or just wasting resources by unnecessarily reinventing the wheel. People who don't have development skills are largely going to be pretty poor developers.
I think of mashups and other situational applications today as a bit like the early efforts at desktop publishing. People got carried away with suddenly being able to experiment with typography and color, producing garishly unprofessional leaflets and flyers. Once the novelty had worn off, they calmed down and started to learn the best practice guidelines that had always been understood by graphic design experts but have since become more common knowledge among less specialized users of the technology. We have to take the same approach to mashups and actually give users a bit of support and training in software lifecycle management best practices. Then, and only then, can we genuinely trust them to do their own mashups.
Well, then, we're a contrarian vendor. :) We offer end-user defined data mashup which can range from users bringing in external datasets such as spreadsheets or combining any data in the BI environment (that they have permissions for).
I think you have to realize that business users already have the power to mashup data as they see fit by exporting data from a locked-down BI environment or data warehouse and analyzing it in Excel. So why frustrate them further and accept the error-prone inefficiency that ensues? Moreover, if they can't be trusted to use the data safely, then they shouldn't be in their job in the first place, no?