Ronan Bradley's FinanceTech Directions

Mash-ups are one of the hot areas for trialing in 2008 and a likely major project area in 2008, 2009 and beyond. The concept is appealing to business users and allows rapid development of useful applications. As I have previously blogged about, mash-ups put a strain on the infrastructure. However the impact is not on the infrastructure alone, it also puts unexpected pressure on the applications supporting the mash-ups. An early adopter in a global investment bank was quoted in a recent article in Waters as pointing out:

"you can't create a service that is designed to support 100 trades per minute and then let someone with a black-box trading system connect to it and expect happy results. The resulting automated traffic would bring the service to its knees and those supporting it would be faced with fielding phone calls from users letting them know the system had gone down."

However, system outage is only one problem - you must also ensure that mash-up user is entitled to use the data (both from an authorization perspective and also from a rights-management perspective as the data may not be licensed for use by the mash-up user).

The only solution is to increase the level of control and governance by defining and enforcing SLA and so on - in effect bringing mash-ups back with the framework of enterprise IT. The challenges will then be

- Finding out where mash-up development is happening in the organization. The very ease with which mash-ups can be created will tend to put them under the radar.

- Convincing the users and developers of the mash-ups that governance is there for good business reasons and not simply central IT attempting to regain control and squash innovation that they do not control.

Ronan