Mashups in Action: This Space Intentionally Left Blank

They say ‘less is more’. When it comes to enterprise mashups in action I think that NOTHING may be the best example you could give. Let me tell you why.

A few weeks ago I was having dinner with an executive from a nationwide homebuilder and the conversation came around to the inevitable, ‘what do you do for a living?’ topic. I replied that I worked for a software vendor and left it at that. (I am not a huge fan of pushing my technology, company, or product on the unsuspecting or unwilling.)

Then my dinner companion amicably asked, ‘what kind of software?’ and I replied, ‘enterprise mashup software’. He hadn’t heard the term before and that’s when he asked my all-time favorite question: ‘what does it do…can you give me an example?’. Given that my CEO has been down this road, I had a huge selection of anecdotes, examples, case studies and metaphors to choose from. So I gave him a few examples from my customers that I thought he might be able to relate to.

It became clear that as many examples as I gave, he wanted something that he could EXACTLY relate - something that solved the type of problems he, as a home-builder, has to deal with every day. Where to start a project, where labor or customer demand might be in flux (and why), and so on. So I crafted a credible mashup example that combined housing prices, interest rates, population and employment statistics, and building material prices. My custom-crafted mashup-in-action example seemed to resonate with my dinner companion but to me it still somehow felt insufficient. But it wasn't until yesterday that I figured out why...

I came across a comment in a new whitepaper (written by Hinchcliffe and Co. on behalf of the Open Mashup Alliance) entitled, ‘EMML Changes Everything: Profitability, Predictability & Performance through Enterprise Mashups’. It has perhaps the best explanation of why simple examples are insufficient and perhaps misleading for a broadly-applicable technology like enterprise mashups. After giving an example (related to staff-utilization), the paper goes on to state:

However, discussing such typical uses for mashups might be missing the point. The mashup's strength lies in discovering the atypical, in exploiting data in new ways. The fact is, any information your business needs can be analyzed with a mashup, often more quickly, with minimal effort, and at much lower expense than hiring consultants or using traditional and more time-consuming SOA approaches to do the same work. Rapid experimentation with data leads to invention.

In short, every specific enterprise mashup example misses the

View the Original article