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The 10 top challenges facing enterprise mashups
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  • Version management. When users can tweak, recombine, share, adjust, and otherwise change a mashup on-the-fly in “edit mode”, how does a business deal with issues of consistency and change management when so many more versions of applications exist than before. Fast rates of change are increasingly becoming the norm both on the Web and in our organizations and mashup platforms that don’t directly have features to support and enable rapid changes in mashup applications will be bringing to their customers as many issues as they solve. IBM’s QEDWiki stands out again as a model where mashups are automatically versioned, just like a wiki page, so that even the mashup can be mashed up again and its clients pinned to particular version. Several of the most recent mashup platforms are making this kind of capability a priority and by the end of 2008, mashup platforms that don’t support version management robustly will likely have serious issues gaining an audience.
  • Awareness and realization of the potential of mashups by the businesses community. One other problem, probably not helped by the term ‘mashup’ itself, is the general awareness of the business value of mashups and their potential to solve tough business problems by providing faster, cheaper access to the right information and IT capabilities than ever before. The fairly immature state of tooling doesn’t help but a lot more has to be done to educate and bring awareness to the general business community and educating them that an important new model for software is emerging. Businesses should be aware of the potential that smart, appropriate application of mashups in many business problems can bring by unleashing productivity, increasing institutional knowledge, and creating new business opportunities and outcomes that simply weren’t possible before. Prior to mashups, there was generally few ways to buy or create a custom software application in a timely, inexpensive manner.
  • Low levels of support by major software firms. Though open source software tends to power the public Web, a large percentage of the infrastructure running businesses today, especially in medium to large organizations, are still largely based on commercial software. And commercial software vendors have been slow to provide explicit support for an enterprise mashup friendly environment. What’s lacking? A number of things including support of Web-Oriented Architecture, offering application functionality in useful API forms, “widgitized” content and functionality, offering rich support for RSS feeds and notification, mashup security solutions, and other related topics. This ensures that enterprises have a lot of work to do on their own before mashups are commonplace in their organizations.The good news, Service-Oriented Architectures are growing more common that understand mashup approaches, which strong prefer standards that support easy consumption in the browser, will help but commercial software needs to be much more mashup friendly. Why are commercial software firms slow to support mashups? Part of it is the typically slow pace of commercial software development as well as a wait and see attitude by many to see how mashups impact their business models, particularly around professional services and integration.
  • Few killer demo mashups. Because of many of the issues above, particularly around security, clearly useful business mashups can be hard to find. Where is the mashup that shows the average user an easy-to-use combined view of all of their calendars: home, business, and mobile? How about the app that allows someone to wire together data from the data warehouse, local SOA, and enterprise content management system? These are still to hard to create for the reasons in the list above and until compelling stories emerge from businesses that have reached the tipping point, enterprise mashups will, like the SOAs that power them, remain a fascinating idea for most but not a significant business motivation.

    • You might think I paint a bleak picture of the enterprise mashups world and nothing could be further from the truth. The last couple of years have taught us an enormous amount about what is possible and what needs to be changed. Most of these items above will likely be addressed in some form or another in the next year or two. Even solving a couple of the key issues will change the software development landscape considerably. In the meantime, I’ll do my best to provide a front-row seat to the unfolding story of what appears to be the next major new software development model.


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