Whitepaper: Enterprise Mashups Change Everything

Tonianne and I just completed a new whitepaper as part of our association with Hinchcliffe and Company. Profitability, Predictability and Performance through Enterprise Mashups is now available for download.

JackBe’s Chris Warner wrote about our EMML whitepaper on the JackBe blog.  In his post, Chris addresses one of the whitepaper's central points - that businesses today need the ability to rapidly respond to major changes within the business context. 

He quotes this section of the whitepaper:

"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."

And then he adds:

“In short, every specific enterprise mashup example misses the [perhaps more important] point that enterprise mashups are good for whatever use the users find. Mashups are genuinely applicable to areas as diverse as situation intelligence, real-time business intelligence, classic decision-support, and lightweight application integration, to name a few. Every day we get more great uses and examples from our partners, our customers, and our mashup developer community members. And I am sure we haven’t even begun to cover all the possibilities.”

You see, we are creating data at an exponential rate. This unprecedented growth is accompanied by the consumer's assumption that products will constantly improve and evolve. Time to market for new products and features has been greatly reduced. This data can be combined and analyzed (via mashups). As data becomes more accessible, products to create the mashups have become easier to use.

Increasingly, anyone can create sophisticated business intelligence, an act previously reserved for highly trained business analysts. In the end, mashups represent a fundamental shift in the way we can create value and test hypotheses. Enterprise mashups take this one step further by creating predictable datasets and useable interfaces.

Download the whitepaper and keep the conversation going.

Comments

[twitter.com/vielmetti]

Jim -

I am sure that mashups are useful; I've built a handful of them myself, using tools which I understand just barely well enough to make things work (but not to really understand them).

My recent experience with extracting and transforming and interconnecting data coming out of local government sources has been frustrating in many cases, generally because the systems I end up dealing with either are closed off (except via FOIA requests) or that they are constructed in such a way that simple mashups fail. It's clearly possible for things to work, but it's more code, and especially more code that isn't really very valuable or quick to write.

Given how frequently systems change some aspect of their public but not documented behavior, most mashups end up being pretty fragile. That means you either need super smart people coding them, or you need tools that are smart for the uncreative and diligent people who need the info, or you need to be prepared to have things break unpredictably from time to time.

I wish the EMML effort well, but it sounds like hard work.