Does Your Enterprise Suffer from the Stalactite Effect?

A recent survey by Accenture of 1,009 Fortune 500 managers found some truly surprising results.

That’s not a great track record. But WHY? We spend $20 billion a year on databases, reporting tools, marts and warehouses, cubes and OLAP and much, much more. After 4+ decades of information technology advancements, how can we be so wrong so often?

Any honest 'expert' (if there can be such a thing on this topic) would probably admit that we are less-than-good for many reasons. I'd like to add an often-overlooked candidate to the list. It’s something I call the 'stalactite effect'. We all know what stalactites are, right? Those long pointy things that hang from the roofs of caves, formed as calcium carbonate-laden water drips over them. On any given day, you'd see no change. But given enough time they can become massive. (The biggest in the world is thought to be a 27-foot monster in the Jeita Grotto in Lebanon.)

In the enterprise, your water drops are your documents, like budget spreadsheets and project plans. Any one document/drop isn't likely to be a huge loss information-wise. But take what you create in a year, add what your nearest cube-mate creates in a year, maybe what the other 17 analysts in your department create in a year and you start to see wonderful stalactite of information. And it's all completely inaccessible to anyone but you. Enterprises like this literally exist in a data cave with lots of drip, drip, drip.

Is the stalactite problem something we just gotta learn to live with? Certainly not! Some very interesting approaches to these ‘micro-silos’ have emerged recently. For instance the Excel Services in the upcoming Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 allow you to use and publish Microsoft Excel client workbooks on the SharePoint Server. And on top of this they’re adding features that provide multiple users with the ability to edit any workbook simultaneously; a ‘Slicer’ feature that is a new type of interactive GUI filter; and a REST API that is a client server software architecture/protocol that defines workbook and how to access them.

Of course, Enterprise Mashups can also help. JackBe has tied spreadsheets directly to our enterprise mashup server through our Excel Connector and Server API. A user can make a workbook into a mashable service right from the spreadsheet itself. The user can also refresh the mashable service at any time. And the reverse is also true, where a user can create a workbook that is directly based upon a live mashups. This is a great roundtrip solution. Want to see it in action? Check out the recording of our 'Mashing Microsoft' webcast. During the webcast we mashed Excel (as well as Project files and a few other things) in real-world scenarios like project management and financial analysis.

This approach to the stalactite problem can be perfect if an organization is losing valuable data on a drip-by-drip document-by-document basis. The document owner contributes the document into the ‘mashup cloud’, tags it, describes it and sets all the right access controls on it. After all, who knows the spreadsheet better than the person who created it?

It’s time enterprises got out of the data cave.

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Mashups in Action: Crisis Planning and Response

This might sound like the opening narrative of a bad disaster movie but it is true: It snowed again today. A genuine blizzard. And this just 2 days after a record-setting snowfall that shut down the region. Schools in the area are closed for a week or more. Some local governments are recommending residents stay at home, which isn't a bad idea considering many gas stations have run out of regular gas, and some grocery stores and restaurants have run out of meat. They say we might get hit again this weekend.

Unfortunately, it's not a bad movie. It's true. And for anyone living in the Mid-Atlantic, you and know I both know I can't do it justice. Sure, 3+ feet in 4 days isn't that much for Buffalo, or Minneapolis, or Chicago (where they NEVER cancel school for snow, apparently). But in a region where the ANNUAL snowfall averages 20 inches, 36+ in a few days is a SNOWPOCALYPSE. It has truly been challenging.

But in my more honest moments I know that this forced respite from my lousy daily commute is nothing next to genuine disasters. Consider Haiti. The series of earthquakes that hit this beleaguered country on January 12 killed hundreds of thousands, and left hundreds of thousands more without the simple benefit of a roof or a regular source of food. The experts say recovery will take a decade. I doubt most of us will ever truly understand the depth of this disaster.

By most accounts the basic step of getting critical search-and-rescue teams, medical supplies and food into Haiti has been difficult, at best. Could such a need have been planned for? Many experts doubt it. But could we help the aid associations and government agencies in their response to the crisis? Absolutely. And the role model for us all should be people like Dan Hudson.

Dan volunteers locally in the Washington DC area. And in addition to his traditional volunteer work, he went another extra mile and used his mashup skills to create a 'Crisis Communication Dashboard' of feeds from places like Twitter, Flickr, CNN, Yahoo and the US Geological Survey (USGS). It paints a good picture of the situation on the ground. And I think his work is immensely powerful, with the result being much more than the sum of its parts. Any organization attempting to address situational awareness needs could learn from Dan's approach and his results.

And then there some crisises we can and should plan for. Here’s another powerful example. At the request of one inspired government executive, we created an 'H1N1 Flu Preparedness Mashup'. The combination of dynamic on weekly flu statistics (from the CDC) with state-by-state employee staffing levels is a truly unique tool for managers to assess the impact on offices and the specific services they provide. If agency has people in a 'red' state (i.e. with 'wide-spread activity'), you could reasonably expect a noticeable impact on productivity. And I think you can imagine the same type of application in areas like supply chain management, product pricing, and product inventory planning, too.

I don’t want to sound preachy, but I think we all could do more for situations like these, both in preparedness and response. I’ll leave the specifics up to you. But I’ll use my bully pulpit to make one strong suggestion: donate. The American Red Cross is accepting donations for Haiti Relief in a number of different ways, whether it's time, money, or goods. And for those of you that know how important time can be in a crisis, you can simply text “HAITI” to 90999 from any mobile phone to donate $10 to ARC relief efforts. My family donated. And we wish we could do more, we truly do.

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We're Certified (and It's All Thanks to Microsoft)

As the leader in the Enterprise Mashup space, we work hard everyday to expand the scope and value of our platform as we solve critical business challenges. One very active area of interest is mashing information to/from Microsoft applications like SharePoint, Excel, Project, Dynamics, and SQL Server. Many of these productivity tools are ubiquitous and they contain some of the most relevant and useful information in an organization.

We have learned a lot about mashup solutions in and around Microsoft's business products in 2009. One great example is the synergy between Presto and Microsoft SharePoint as a best-of-breed Enterprise Mashup Solution. Interestingly, this use-case came from our customers and partners. Our blogseries "A Developer's Guide to Mashups and Microsoft SharePoint” began as a small skunkworks effort that ended in a 10-part series and Mashups for SharePoint is one of the most-popular special-interest areas in our Mashup Developer Community. That's a pretty clear message.

And now we are a Microsoft Certified Partner. What's that mean to you? In the words of JackBe's Co-Founder, Luis Derechin, it "allows our customers and partners to confidently grow their SharePoint implementations into an enterprise-wide collaboration and decision-support platform". Let me tell you what that means in practical terms.

Using our Enterprise Mashup Platform, Presto, and Microsoft SharePoint, you can pull information from Excel Spreadsheets, .Net Web Services, SQL Server (and other relational databases), SharePoint lists, REST services and RSS/Atom feeds, and non-Microsoft enterprise apps, such as Oracle Siebel, Salesforce.com, or PeopleSoft, to name just a few. For all these Microsoft and non-Microsoft information sources, you can securely consume, combine and share this information as syndicatable widgets and micro apps. These micro apps are easily surfaced as SharePoint web parts, Java Portlets and Google gadgets to name a few, and they can be rapidly and securely published to any web friendly environment in minutes or hours.

All this can be accomplished today, which allows for extremely powerful Enterprise Mashup Solutions for both Microsoft and non-Microsoft environments. But we're not done yet. As the guy in charge of our SharePoint integration efforts, I can tell you confidently that the future is very bright when it comes to Enterprise Mashups in the Microsoft SharePoint space...so stay tuned for more big things from JackBe in the near future!

We're celebrating our certifiable status with 'Mashing Microsoft, a live webcast next Thursday, February 11, at 12 noon EST. Our CTO John Crupi will show how to easily mash data from SharePoint, Excel and Project, and many other popular enterprise applications. You can register for 'Mashing Microsoft' here.

And you can always check out the latest Mashup for SharePoint demos, videos, how-to guides and sample code on JackBe's Mashups for SharePoint site. Mash on.

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It’s Time for CIOs (and McKinsey) to Get a New Playbook

Jeff Hammond at Forrester recently wrote an article in Information Week about ‘What Developers Think,’ which recapped the results of a survey Forrester did with Dr. Dobb's.

They asked ‘more than 1,000 platform-agnostic, programming-language-independent Dr. Dobb's readers’ a lot of things and then identified seven trends that could have major implications for IT strategy. The summary of the results says it all:

‘Software developers are adopting new technologies or techniques including RIAs, virtualization and Agile development. They're using and contributing to open source projects, and challenging the conventions that underpin the way enterprise software and tools are built and sold. This transition will accelerate as developer tech populism takes hold and drives the adoption of new development approaches related to cloud computing, scale-out architectures that can accommodate change and mobile Web applications.'

Great stuff! As a manager of these folks, your message couldn’t be clearer: you need a different gameplan than the long-term, high-risk approaches you’ve used in the past. Scrum is in, the waterfall model is out. But just when it seems IT is going to shake off the reputation as a group to work ‘around’ and not ‘with’, McKinsey goes and fumbles the ball in ‘Data to Dollars’ (you’ll have to register on their site to read the entire 8-page paper). To me it reads like a ‘How NOT To Guide’ for CIOs.


The intent of this paper is certainly worthy: ‘Chief information officers have a chance to expand their influence as the mediators between business requirements and IT capabilities.’ And, at first glance, I was pretty sure they were going to talk the same talk as Jeff Hammond. Replacing the old top-down, big-bang playbook with one that emphasizes speed and agility. Boy, was I sorely disappointed.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not a McKinsey-hater. Long-time readers know I’ve quoted their work before. And in this case McKinsey gives good lip-service to getting the ‘right data to the right people.’ But the core of the paper simply describes a complete top-to-bottom rebuild of your information architecture. In other words, McKinsey believes that if what you have sucks, you should go and re-architect the entire thing AGAIN.

In 2 pain-staking pages they describe a model project that is a freakin’ HUGE effort (excuse my hyperbole). It includes, among other things, a new data warehouse, a system-wide data quality effort, new application-to-application integration, interface rebuilds of existing applications and a new highly-structured reporting system. And all of it built by good ole IT for the benefit of the users.

I know of some organizations that might benefit from old-school top-down, big-bang decision-support efforts. But if I were a CIO today, I’d think twice before throwing a Hail Mary pass like that. This isn’t the fast, responsive approach your users want or that your developers are adopting. Today’s IT offense needs to be nimble and quick.

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10 for 2010: I Predict Google Gars, Apple Books, a CNN Moment and More

[I originally published this post on my 'Enterprise Mashups in Action' blog at eBizQ. I got some great feedback and decided to repost it for the loyal readers here. I hope you find it as interesting to read as I found to write.]

It's that time (again) when 'arm-chair visionaries' like me sit back and attempt to predict the next 12 months of technologies. In preparation, I did a quick search to see what others predicted for 2009. Some were better than others. The more conservative prognosticators predicted a Twitter growth explosion and growth in interest in Cloud Computing. Edgier predictions included 'email will die' and 'WiFi will be ubiquitous'. And of course there were some things no one predicted, such as Amazon digital book sales would outpace paper book sales on Christmas Day 2009. But overall I think the 2009 predictions were pretty conservative and unexciting, perhaps due to the looming recession.

However, as the US economy is starting to stabilize and we have a year of pent up technology cabin fever, I predict 2010 will be a technology innovation 'hockey stick year' (that visionary-speak for exponential growth). So, with that high standard in mind, here's what my crystal ball tells me:

1. Apple brings sexy back to books. Apple releases the 'LiveBook'. It looks like a 7" iPhone but it's meant for traditional book reading and the newly created Apple iPub publishing platform. LiveBook not only let's you interact live with books using iPhone touch gestures, but let's you interact with LiveBooks using text, live video, interactive widgets, social networking and collaboration. You can also write you own LiveBooks and publish via my iPhone Apps.

2. Enterprise Mashups have a 'CNN moment'. After one federal staffer creates a mashup that uncovers millions of dollars lost to Medicare fraud, Wolf Blitzer asks, 'Why doesn't every government employee have this at his or her disposal?' President Obama asks: "Is this the technology to connect-the-dots?"

3. Gartner turns back time. Realizing Enterprise Mashups went from Cool to Useful, Gartner puts Enterprise Mashups on their 2011 'Technologies to Watch' list. And using their previously-unknown time-shifting powers, they also retroactively insert it into their 2010 Watch List.

4. Enterprises shift from 'Me' to 'We'. It's no surprise that the key to increased employee productivity is to reduce cost and time needed to make important decisions. In 2009, there was much talk about "customized" data and widgets so users could make decisions faster, aka 'Me.' In 2010, the focus will be on collaboration and group decision, aka 'We.'

5. Google gets into the auto business. Google launches a solar car company called Google Cars which quickly becomes known on the street as 'Gars.' Gars aren't for sale; they are free to use. Gars are equipped with a 360 degree camera used for Google Street views and powerful WiMax Mesh antennas. Both inside and outside are live ads based on Google's new Geospatial-based ad auctioning system. You reserve a Gar for use for a period of time and pick it up at one of the 'Garplexes'. Your reservation priority is based on your Google points which are in turn based on how much time you spend with other Google products. Whether it's Google Droid, Gmail or Google Docs, you're always racking up points and earning the right to drive a Gar.

6. The BI industry learns to copy but forgets how to read. The big BI vendors see the impact agile, self-service technologies (like Enterprise Mashups!) are having on their customers and launches an all out assault trying to minimize mashups as a 'feature' of their massive BI systems. Unfortunately, they never read the Innovators Dilemma and fail to see that they are overshooting the market and Enterprise Mashup vendors are silently taking away BI Mashup market-share.

7. TIME Magazine names 2010 the 'Real-time' Year. Enterprises want their information as fast and as quick as a Google web search. Everyone knows it (but maybe the BI guys) and in recognition of this TIME also names Speedy Gonzalez as Person of the Year, although they say he 'isn't as fast as he used to be'.

8. Oracle acquires 9,782 more companies. This prediction doesn't take much insight, truthfully. Unfortunately, one of these 9,782 companies went out of business three years ago and another they already acquired two years earlier. I also predict Larry Ellison is not pleased with this.

9. Microsoft sells more SharePoint. (Yes, I know, I am prescient.) In 2010 Microsoft sells more licenses than all other software from all other software vendors combined. This drives Gartner to release the 'SharePoint Magic Quadrant', only to later realize Microsoft is the only one on it. Bill Gates is quite pleased with this and Larry Ellison is not.

10. The DIY folks form a union. In 2010 Generation Y-ers form the 'Open Self-Service Alliance' touting 'We can do it ourselves,' demand that IT support them, rewriting the 80/20 equation to be the 20/80 equation.

That's my top 10 or 2010. Love them, hate them, critique them, but remember where you heard them first. Good luck to all in this tech-packed New Year.

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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 [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.

Each new wave of technology goes through the, ‘what is it good for’ phase and the world of enterprise mashups is no exception. JackBe has certainly done its part with examples in the form of long case studies, short case summaries, YouTube videos, live demos, our long-running ‘Mashups in Action’ blog series, and even a ‘Build an Example’ contest. But perhaps the next time I get asked to ‘give an example’, I may give the best answer of all…and leave that spot on the form blank.

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Let's Put an End to 'Swivel Chair Integration'

I originally published this post on my 'Enterprise Mashups in Action' blog at eBizQ. I got some great feedback and decided to repost it for the loyal readers here. I hope you find it as interesting to read as I found to write.

Ending the Reign of the Swivel Chair: The Biggest Business Problem Enterprise Mashups Solve

Interactive Data Corp (IDC) published a report a few years ago titled 'The Hidden Costs of Information Work'. In it they reported that 'searching for and analyzing information both consume 24% of the typical information worker's time'.

IDC referred to these areas as 'relatively straightforward candidates for better automation'. I couldn't agree more. And with the volume of data doubling every 18 months, I'd venture to say this statistic is getting even worse. We're not getting less silo'ed, we're actually becoming more silo'ed. With all the mergers and acquisitions and SaaS offerings we've heard a continuous flow of horror stories of multiple systems managing everything from accounting, marketing and sales to customer support.

In short, we're not getting any better at helping our knowledge workers do their job. Instead these critical thinkers resort to "swivel chair integration," going from screen to screen (or if you're in the browser, tab-to-tab) copying and pasting data from one system to another. Not for data entry, but rather lookup and correlation to turn the data into information that supports their decision-making.

Of course, if these source systems were integrated, they wouldn't have to "swivel." But the reality is the systems they rely on are not integrated and with ever-shrinking IT budgets they never will be. And as IT gives these problems less attention, I think these important decision-makers are getting squeezed a little more every day, with more and more of their critical 'decision time' being replaced by simple 'gather' time.

In fact, I believe that silo'ed systems are so ubiquitous that many organizations have simply given up trying to integrate them. But our knowledge workers still have to make decisions based on all this data, so what do we do?

Luckily, silo'ed data needed for informed decisions are a sweet spot for new, '2.0-style' information technologies like enterprise mashups. Enterprise mashups are tuned to easily and quickly gather data from many systems and presented in order to allow for real-time decision making. Here is a real-world example that follows the basic enterprise mashup pattern (extrapolated from a popular 'Data Center Mashup' video by Steve Graham, a major contributor to Apache Axis and now a Software Architect at the University of Chicago):

Problem: The IT Support team spends a significant amount of time analyzing software errors, trying to determine if the source of the problem is hardware-related, software-related or an end-user issue. The team needs better insight into the status of hardware and software assets on the network to help correlate these assets with the error tickets. The issues may be reported or discovered by the users, via SNMP traps, in application or hardware logs, or a combination of the three.

Example Data Sources:
1. HP Operations Manager: for gathering SNMP Traps for network monitoring
2. BMC Remedy Service Desk: for managing trouble tickets and incidents
3. Custom application #1: with all hardware server related information and IPs
4. Custom application #2: with all software assets and server deployment information

Decision Time Frame: As quickly as possible.

Impact: The longer it takes to isolate the problem, the more time, money and opportunity will be lost. Depending on the 'mission criticalness' of the software, the impact can be severe.

Solution: Real-time enterprise mashups tie directly into all four data sources, with a mechanism support engineered to locate information via IP address, server name, software system name and trouble ticket numbers. They then use information to filter and correlate from these sources and present information via a dashboard that shows the correlated network, hardware and software errors associated with each trouble ticket.

If you look at the above description and had to sum the problem up in a short statement, you'd probably say something like "The support engineers need data from multiple disparate systems to solve their problems. Since these systems are not integrated, they will have to do a lot of manual work to analyze the data across multiple systems. Let's make sure they all have swivel chairs!"

Hopefully, you get the idea. Enterprise mashups are a great way to solve the age-old integration-by-swivel-chair problem. Let's let the swivel chair return to its 'trusty but boring office companion' status.

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Tree House Mashups

From time to time we invite guests to share their skills and experiences with us. Today we have a guest from within JackBe, Shawn Pike, who has dozens of conversations daily with our partners, our customers and our prospective customers. In his inaugural guest post Shawn shares his unique perspective on mashups and the 'leverage whatcha have' notion of mashups in the enterprise.

It always amazed me the personal projects that my father’s construction partner Dennis would undertake at his home in upstate New York. As a ten year-old boy, I remember marveling at the mammoth of a tree house he had built for his three children, which rivaled any but the Swiss Family Robinson attraction at Disney World. Do you remember the tour?

I remember the crazy collection of ladders, ropes and slides used as entrances or exits; the different tiles adorning parts of the main room; the stools and desks for studying and the shelving for books; the cupboard holding midday snacks, screened windows and a working door. I was too busy exploring the place to hear my father ask about the materials and cost. I certainly heard all about it later.

On the ride home, my father made sure to drive home the point of Dennis’s true ingenuity and genius; nearly the whole tree house had been constructed with materials he already had or could get for free. He was famous for leveraging what he had and improvising instead of running out to the hardware store. Nowadays I can't help but think of the enterprise mashup world and the propensity of mashups to leverage current data and systems, instead of building from scratch.

Over the past year, I have spoken with thousands of the top executives in the commercial and government sectors about their current methods of application development and heard repeatedly about the lack of budget and resources. Curiously, never have the expectations been higher as the users demand even more timely and accurate data to make quick and informed decisions. No doubt we need more people with the “Dennis mentality” in the IT world to meet these new organizational challenges.

We just had a financial system meltdown where the absence of real-time, situational awareness no doubt contributed to the catastrophe. Our government is pursuing the greatest transparency and accountability initiative in history. Our militaries face asymmetrical threats where intelligence is the game-changer. And the demand for organizations to collaborate is greater than ever before. How do we meet these challenges with limited budgets and resources in an economic atmosphere where organizational employees are cut or forced to work less in order to save money?

Mike Ogrinz, the author of Mashup Patterns, Mike Orgrinz, recently wrote in a blog, “Legacy resources are everywhere, and they can easily be incorporated in today’s new mashups.” I couldn't agree more! I think the enterprise mashup paradigm starts on the right premise: stop thinking 'big and new' and start looking at your current stock of assets. Enterprise mashup solutions provide a way to leverage your current architectures, working with your existing data (whether internal or external to your organization), live natively in your current security infrastructure, and connect to the plethora of reporting and analysis tools you likely already have, all in order to innovate for much cheaper and faster than the common start-from-scratch methods. No assets should go unconsidered.

Enterprise mashup solutions (like JackBe's Presto) provide the easiest and safest way to quickly put together creative and dynamic applications for your users without interrupting your current IT operations. When the smoke clears from the economic downturn we presently are foraging through, I am guessing the IT organizations standing tall will be the ones with leaders who have the “Dennis mentality” and an EM solution in their tool kits.

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When it comes to Enterprise Mashups…don’t listen to me!

“Never become so much of an expert that you stop gaining expertise. View life as a continuous learning experience.” -- Denis Waitley

Over the last few months I have learned that a lot of my thoughts on Enterprise Mashups were wrong. And you must understand that this is a difficult thing to admit. As the company that invented the first Enterprise Mashup Platform, Presto, we were certain that we had all of the right answers to the question of ‘what is an enterprise Mashup and what kind of value do they create?’.

Most cognoscenti consider their opinions to be relatively unassailable when it comes to the topic on which they are experts. In my case, my belief in myself began to unravel in the most unlikely of places: on national TV. When I appeared on Fox Business Channel I was asked to explain what a mashup. As some of you know, I did not do a very good job at it.

So, as the saying goes, the first step in fixing a problem is realizing you have one. We knew that we didn’t have the best answers, so I had my team set out on a journey to discover better ways to share the mashup story through definitions, use cases and the like. We set out on what I called a “mash-about” (named after the aboriginal “walk-about”).

We tried many things to get the answers we needed. Some were innovative, some were wacky, some were unproductive, and all of them were at least a bit self-deprecating. Afterall, we were the experts and yet we were asking laymen to help us write our ‘story’. It’s crowd-sourcing at it’s finest, I think. And it’s been quite a revealing journey.

In our first effort, the "Beat the CEO” contest, we challenged people to provide a better definition. And the “Mashup “Tribe” (that’s YOU) came through with some great insights. There were metaphors, technical descriptions, short answers and long ones, and much, much more.

Next we hosted the “Explain it on the back of a business card” contest. Can you explain what a mashup is using only the whitespace on the back of a business card? I am happy to report that almost 100 graphics artists did. Who knew there were so many ways to describe a mashup by a simple picture?

Finally, we invested time in listening to our customers, our prospective customers, our partners, our competitors (some of them, at least), and the 3,000+ members of our Mashup Developer Community. There were literally thousands of lessons to be learned from the things they were doing with mashups.

And we took all this input and grouped it all into three areas of interest: ‘WHAT is an Enterprise Mashup?’, ‘HOW do you do create an Enterprise Mashup?’, and ‘WHY should an organization care about mashups?’. Since you’ve read this far, I expect you’d be interested in the results:

WHAT (is an Enterprise Mashup):

Enterprise Mashups are secure, visually rich web applications that expose actionable information from diverse internal and external information sources.

We tried to simplify the definition as much as possible so we focused on what we thought were the four most important elements:

• Secure – We’ve written about the common secure requirements for mashups before. Without this set of capabilities, you’ll never get past the enterprise front door.


• Visually rich – Mashups can certainly be published as a data service using a format like RSS or WSDL. But we’ve found that they more often end as visual representations (often personalized or customized by the mashup consumer) that lets users better understand the data and make informed decisions.


• Actionable – The dictionary defines “actionable” as “relating to or being information that allows a decision to be made or action to be taken”. We’re talking about data that a knowledge worker can understand and which doesn’t require lots of processing.


• Internal and external – Mashups provide aggregation and manipulation of information from many sources (inside and outside the firewall). Many people wrongly assume that they focus on one or the other when in practice they are typically a mix of both.

This definition usually lets people ‘get it’. And then their next comment is “OK, that sounds cool, but why should I care? Why would an organization invest time and money on this?”.

The “Mashup Tribe” was very clear in telling us that mashups let them solve what is often called “The Decision-Makers Dilemma”: Poor decisions are often made because decision-makers do not have the right information at the right time. This Dilemma is created by a combination of 4 situations that can be found in just about every complex organization:

• Data is frequently ‘siloed’ or isolated in data stores inaccessible to users across an organization.


• Combining disparate data sources manually is labor-intensive, time consuming and error-prone.


• IT rarely has the time, budget or human resources to address individual user’s needs.


• The inability to securely share information with peers leads to redundant work and inconsistent results.

So, we gathered our thoughts to define WHY (do you need an Enterprise Mashup):

Poor decisions are often made because decision-makers do not have the right information at the right time. Enterprise Mashups deliver new insights and enable better decisions through personalized access to the right, real-time information for the specific problem at hand.

In other words, organizations achieve value by allowing individuals to glean new insights by putting the right data together at the right time for the right situation. This empowers people with much better information about what they care, when it matters and in a way that makes sense to them.

These benefits peak people’s interest and it usually leads to the next question “what’s the best way to create enterprise mashups?” Rather than saying “buy my product”, we thought it of more value to describe the characteristics of a REAL Enterprise Mashup Platform (EMP), as there are many impostors who want you to believe that they offer 'Mashups' while in fact they offer something else entirely. So, we concluded that the following describes the benefits an Enterprise Mashup Platform has over existing integration and BI technology for creating mashups.

HOW (can you create an Enterprise Mashup):

An EMP is a technology suite that enables the rapid, collaborative, user-driven creation of Enterprise Mashups without the complexities, costs and risks of traditional information integration projects.

Like our definition of enterprise mashup, we focused on a few key components of an EMP:

• ‘rapid, collaborative, user-driven creation’ – Enterprise Mashup Platforms should allow users and developers to work together to rapidly create a mashup that complies with their business needs. This isn’t an IT-only effort. Furthermore, an EMP allows the re-use of components to get even faster results in future situations. Is there’s no re-usability of the mashups you are making, you are simply building another application silo.


• ‘without the complexities, costs and risks of traditional information integration projects’ – Mashups are designed to be quickly built, quickly used, and quickly shared. And they have an extremely small ‘footprint’ themselves, requiring no datastore but instead consuming directly from source databases/services/APIs/documents. That’s how you can avoid the ‘complexities, costs and risks’.

There you have it, the ‘What, Why and How’ of Enterprise Mashups. But don’t listen to me. Listen to hundreds of people who collaborated on our mash-about -- our customers, partners, and community members –- as they are the experts and they have taught us plenty about Enterprise Mashups. I am glad we were listening and I can promise you that this is one expert who will continue to do so!

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OMG! We launched OMA and EMML!

Today is an exciting day for us at JackBe. It is particularly exciting for our engineering team. Why? Walk down the memory lane with me for a minute...

About 3 years ago, we embarked on a mission to create a new kind of software which today we call an ‘enterprise mashup platform’. And as we started designing JackBe’s enterprise mashup platform (which we ultimately named 'Presto'), we knew the basic problem we needed to address was how to make data securely and easily accessible to enterprise users.

That's not an easy problem, of course. 'Easy' and 'secure' aren't often associated with each other. And enterprises are typically heterogeneous collections of data sources, data security solutions, data destinations; web services, portals, databases, spreadsheets, and much, much more. And as we considered the many different options we had to tackle this complex problem, we always came back to one fundamental concept that has proven its worth time and again:

A language is the best tool one can have.

So began our journey towards an 'Enterprise Mashup Markup Language' (EMML), a language specifically designed to address the needs of creating and sharing mashups within the enterprise...

In conceiving, designing and implementing the language, Raj (our chief architect) and I set out defining the key wants and desires and came up with the following criteria as a basis for EMML:

1. It should be declarative. So we made it XML-based.
2. It should leverage existing standards. So we used XPath and XQuery.
3. It should be domain specific to enterprise mashups. So we added features for user oriented activities.
4. It should be friendly to popular languages. So we allow the embed of Java, JavaScript, Ruby, and Groovy scripts.
5. It should be tooling friendly. So we made it interpretive for construction and execution on the fly. And extensible with your own meta-data.
6. It should be data neutral. So we made it work with all kinds of data from different sources.

While I will refrain from describing the complete language in this blog (instead refer you to the excellent documentation on EMML on the Open Mashup Alliance website), I would like to point out a few key features of EMML here using the following diagram:

As you can see, from each feature, and from the collection of all the features EMML offers, it a robust and powerful language for mashups. And over the last few years, EMML has become an important differentiator for Presto, our award winning Enterprise Mashup Platform. As part of Presto, since its debut, EMML has been thoroughly field-tested and proven. It is time to take EMML to the next level.

So now let’s return to the present and let me tell you why it is so exciting for all of us here at JackBe.

Today we launched the Open Mashup Alliance (OMA) to promote and foster interoperability and portability through an open mashup language. As a founding member of OMA, JackBe has contributed EMML to the Alliance and, indirectly, to the entire mashup community. Joining us (see this, this and this)are other industry leaders such as Adobe, Bank of America, Capgemini, Hinchcliffe & Co., HP, Intel, Kapow Technologies, Programmable Web, Synteractive, and Xignite.

So why I am so excited about giving away our vision and our hard work? Why would we want to give away one of our crown jewels? Because…

1. It offers an opportunity for our industry to converge upon an open language that aids interoperability and portability of enterprise mashups.
2. I believe that OMA offers a huge potential in enabling enterprise mashup adoption in the enterprise by promoting standard approaches and reducing risk and cost.
   
3. As a practitioner, I strongly believe in open and standards based approaches for new and emerging technologies and for enterprise mashups, OMA and EMML are it.
4. By contributing EMML to OMA, we will see a lot more innovation in this space by the members of the mashup community.
5. I look forward to working with other industry leaders who want to collaborate to ensure portability and interoperability for enterprise mashups.

Why should you care? I hope many of the above reasons are also the relevant reasons for you. As a vendor or a practitioner, I hope you share the excitement and passion for openness and collaboration in any technology. Check out what several industry leaders are saying about OMA and EMML and you will get a sense of why I am so thrilled.

As the enterprise mashup market evolves further, OMA will provide a platform to bring together different efforts around enterprise mashups into a collaborative alliance. If you are a mashup developer, programmer, IT developer, IT Manager, software vendor, or someone simply interested in enterprise mashups, join the OMA Support Group, check out OMA website and download EMML reference implementation and start participating now.

This is just the start of things to come. Mash On!

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Mashup Devolution

Last week JackBe hosted 3-day Mashup Training webcast series. We covered a lot of ground during the Training including the organizational value of mashups (more on that in another blog post), the way in which mashups fit into enterprise IT architecture, how mashups support the executive/analyst/developer, and finally, lots of examples of mashups in action.

During the Training we used our visual mashup composer, Presto Wires, to create/modify many of the mashups-in-action. Interestingly, it seemed that one of the more popular features of Wires was the capability to create 'macros'. Much like macro in Microsoft Excel, Wires Macros are user-defined mashup actions written in Presto's Enterprise Mashup Markup Language that add custom, user- or organization-specific functions that go well beyond the usual 'sum, merge, join, filter' options.

Can you imagine a mashup platform without this mundane-but-important capability? Every major programming/development language of the last 3 decades has had some form of callable asubroutine. Microsoft Excel has gone so far as put this power right into the hands of the non-techy spreadsheet-maker.

But, oddly enough, not all mashup platforms vendors seem to agree with me. Some don't allow the mashup-maker to create and/or share macros. Without Macros or some similar form of simple extensibility in a mashup solution, you are setting yourself back 30+ years. It's some odd form of software 'devolution'.

The domain-specific applications of macros are endless. One of our banking customers added a compound interest calculator as a macro. A data publishing giant added a 'linear data formatter' macro, whatever that means. You can easily imagine a cholesterol calcalutor (healthcare). A risk calculator (finance, insurance). A purchase-price calculator (any purchasing department). A delivery-time or shipping-cost estimator (shipping, airlines). Tax/interest calculator (any industry).

And Macros can cross organizational boundaries as well. JackBe's Mashup Developer Community has started a Macro Code Depot for our Mashup Developer Community (MDC) members where anyone can contribute Macros or reuse Macros created by other mashers. And we believe in Macros some much that the MDC is we're hosting a Macro fo the Month Contest. You can check out a brief video demo of a Macro in action on the MDC.

We've written a lot about the importance of reuse as a mashup best practice (here and here). And macros are a practical, rubber-hits-the-road example of reusablility. But Macros mean more. Macros turn a generic mashup solution into a mashup solution that fits the needs of your organization, your department, and your employees. This is about making a mashup platform in your mashup platform.

Macros are a must-have best practice. Got no extensibility in your mashup platform? Send us a postcard from 1965.

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Mashups in Action: Stories from the Global Mashup Developer Community

We are approaching the 1-year anniversary of JackBe's Mashup Developer Community. When the big date comes I expect we'll have over 3,000 members. That's 3,000 'Mashups in Action' stories eager to be told. As you would expect from such a big group of people, the goals of our Mashup Developer Community members are very, very diverse. And there are many lessons to be learned from their stories.

Our members come from 5 continents (43 countries) and all 50 US states. They use Java (54%) and .NET (33%). They are focused on Web development (17%), SOA (17%), Portals (5%) and a bunch of other technology initiatives. They are CIOs, Application Developers, Systems Integrators, and many other titles and roles. They work in Government, Finance, Higher Education, Healthcare, and lots of other industries. Their one common thread is the use of mashups in their day-to-day work.

We've started an informal catalog of the many ways in which our community members are using enterprise mashups in their organizations. Here are a few of my favorites (with monor edits to protect the privacy of our community members)...

...a project for a bank to help them understand how their company is performing globally and be able to make quick decisions.

...how [JackBe's] Presto works with the BackBase Platform...building a portal and needs sophisticated mashup like you have done for [a government website].

...GIS Manager moving to a web mapping environment that uses mash-ups and widgets.

...has a sophisticated data warehouse portal and would like to provide some simplified tools for the public to use to explore data. Integration with some mapping tools, hang out some RSS and GeoRSS feeds for folks to subscribe too, etc.

...using mashups to bridge the gap between small businesses and the internet and the mobile web...a good fit in these data federation – data integration efforts.

But there are a lot more stories. An entire planet of them. Every point on the map below is a Mashup Developer Community member doing cool enterprise mashup work. Some have detailed stories behind them and some are interesting simply because of their locale:

View Where in the World are our Mashers? in a larger map

Enterprise Mashups are showing value in many ways we would have never thought possible just a year ago. That's the REAL story.

What's your story? We'd love to have you join our global mashup conversation.

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Why you shouldn’t be getting your ‘BI 2.0’ from your BI vendor

InformationWeek recently reported that the total revenue for the 2008 Business Intelligence (BI) software market came in at $8.8 billion, with six vendors -- SAP/Business Objects, SAS Institute, Oracle IBM /Cognos, Microsoft, and MicroStrategy -- owning 75% of the market. The report also says that BI software sales experienced 22% growth from 2007 to 2008. The BI market appears to be a very healthy place.

And yet James Koblielus, Forrester’s BI Analyst, recently published a great blog and paper titled: Mighty Mashups: Do-It-Yourself Business Intelligence For The New Economy. In it he talks about the shift taking place in BI shops to a new “mashup-style, self-service development of business intelligence (BI) applications.” He explains this shift by summarizing that “enterprises are adopting self-service BI approaches for many reasons--principally, to cut costs in a tight economy, to unclog the development backlog, and to speed delivery of actionable, targeted intelligence to decision makers.” In case you missed it, the meta-message from Forrester is simple: companies are looking for new ways to make faster decisions because their current BI solutions don’t deliver.

While I don’t agree that BI Mashups are going to (or should) come from the BI vendors, I certainly agree with Kobielus that change is coming. And I think that change will be based on enterprise mashups.

You only need to look at the speed with which companies are acquiring, merging, failing, and consolidating (sometimes all of these at once) to understand the intense real-time information needs of decision-makers. As this need increases, it won’t be today’s BI systems doing the work. Why? Current BI approaches are inflexible, fragile, costly, slow, and have little user-facing self-service capabilities. Don’t believe me? Go tell your BI team you want to create your own dashboard and share it with your department via Sharepoint. Prepare for uncontrollable laughter or utter contempt. Heck, the mere fact you have to ask an ‘expert’ to do it for you is something of a failure.

Kobielus’ use of the phrase ‘BI mashup’ is very telling. He supports his thesis with an outline of a ‘BI Mashup Maturity Model’ with levels from ‘Lightweight presentation mashup against transactional applications’ to ‘Level 4: Full collaborative mashup with IT governance’. And that’s where he loses me. What about this is 'Business Intelligence'? While reading this I could have sworn he was describing enterprise mashups! Sure, I understand the part where BI vendors want (and need) to embrace this ‘faster, cheaper, more flexible’ message or risk have their warehouses become nothing more than sources to enterprise mashup platforms (EMPs). But I think the more logical conclusion is this: the future of your BI system is mashups.

Yes, I am biased. But my customers, prospects, and partners aren't. In the last 3 years we’ve had countless BI-using organizations come to us with a need to address their more immediate decision-support requirements. Generally, they all want to bring more timely information to a wider-audience with more self-service, collaboration and secure sharing with peers. Yes, they want some of that data to be sourced from their BI systems. (BI systems are, afterall, very good at giving historical views of transactional information.) But their BI systems are not up to the task of being the entire solution. Fundamentally, real-time answers from real-time sources isn’t what BI vendors do. That’s an enterprise mashup. There are some other important differences as well. Take a peek at my comparison of the abstract qualities of BI and Enterprise Mashup Platforms.

I can also summarize the differences in another, more functional way. I took typical BI and EMP capabilities to create a visual comparison based on ‘audience reach’ and ‘number of dynamic data sources’. You can see that traditional BI is gaining in speed and audience reach by adding things like in memory cubes and “semi-self-serve” dashboards (it’s more like simple customization and personalization). BI is great at well-controlled reporting from a well-manicured warehouse or cube. But reach beyond that design tenet and you’re into enterprise mashup territory, I think.


Many organizations have a lot of resources invested in their BI system. And the $8.8 billion spent on BI last year certainly adds value to the enterprises that own that software. But the future of BI is about mashups. Your BI is an enterprise mashup enabler, not an enterprise mashup platform. BI has (and probably always will) have its place in reporting, forecasting and analytics. Just don’t try to force your BI to do what Enterprise Mashups do best: real-time decision-support. You want ‘BI Mashups’? Get an enterprise mashup platform.

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Lessons from The Golden Hammer and The Mule

'I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.' (Abraham Maslow, The Psychology of Science, 1966). Most college freshmen learn about the hammer. And we certainly know all about the hammer in the IT industry. By 1998 this worst-practice had become so common in IT circles, in fact, that the book 'AntiPatterns: Refactoring Software, Architectures, and Projects in Crisis' immortalized this anti-pattern with the happy title of 'the golden hammer'.

Recently, Ross Mason, the CTO of open-source SOA tools creator MuleSource, wrote a great blog about the golden hammer problem in the world of the ESB. We feel his pain. As an emerging technology vendor ourselves, we are very eager to understand and share the best uses of enterprise mashup technology.

You have a fairly good use-case for enterprise mashups if you have a dynamic information environment that requires the real-time assembly of disparate data silos in a user-specific context for critical decision-making. But that's a bit of a mouthful. So what do enterprise mashups mean in business terms? I like the answer I got from a CTO at BlueCross BlueShield, the medical insurance giant: mashups '...create valuable and actionable information'. Recent examples we've seen include solutions for Situational Awareness, budget analysis, Recovery and Reinvestment Act reporting, clinical research, data packaging, and executive KPI dashboards.

Interestingly, we are also occasionally asked why can't an ESB can't do the job of an Enterprise Mashup Platform. ESBs and Enterprise Mashup Platform ('EMP', for short) have some similar qualities but they differ in one fundamental way: ESBs are decidely 'A-to-A' (application-to-application) and EMPs are 'A-to-U' (application-to-user).

ESBs emphasize features and qualities that support robust application-to-application integration and just don't have any true user-facing, collaborative capabilities. And I think Ross agrees: 'Mule and other ESBs offer real value in scenarios where there are at least a few integration points or at least 3 applications to integrate. They are also well suited to scenarios where loose coupling, scalability and robustness are required.'

In contrast, enterprise mashups are as much about viewing, rating, personalizing and sharing as they are about data assembly. Here at JackBe we think about mashlets, porlets, spreadsheets, and iPhone apps as much as we think about data-source virtualization, mashup transformations and standardized mashup interfaces. To paraphrase one of my favorite Gartner analysts, an enterprise mashup platform without meaningful capabilities to deliver the mashups to consuming users is simply not an enterprise mashup platform.

What this really means is that ESBs like MuleSource and EMPs like JackBe's Presto compliment each other very well. #5 on Ross's 'ESB Selection Criteria' list even says 'Do you need to publish services for consumption by other applications? This is a good fit for Mule as it provides a robust and scalable service container...'. And that's exactly where an EMP comes in! One of JackBe's best customers uses ESB-based web services instrumented with Web Services Notification to send data a number consuming applications, including Presto. Presto mashes the inbound data and delivers the mashup via mashlet to a user-facing portal in real-time.

As my 9th-grade shop-class teacher used to say: 'A good carpenter knows his tools'. Makes me wonder if Maslow was a friend of his.

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A Week in a Blink

It is never boring to work at a software company in an exploding software category. But this week the usual frenetic pace of the enterprise mashup market moved up an order of magnitude. If you blinked, you might have missed something juicy.

InfoWorld started the frenzy by publishing ‘Enterprise mashups gain traction at last’, an interview with John Crupi, JackBe’s CTO ‘Tech Titan’. And just yesterday, InfoWorld doubled down on enterprise mashups with a short op-ed piece from the intrepid David Linthicum, ‘JackBe is practicing safe mashups’. (You gotta love the title of this one.)

Anthony Bradley and David Gootzit at Gartner announced 3 new papers related to enterprise mashups: ‘Building a Business Case for Enterprise Mashups: A Gartner Framework’, ‘The Five Core Principles of Enterprise Mashups’ and an almost-published ‘A Gartner Reference Architecture for Enterprise Mashups’. (We’ll definitely be talking about these reports a lot more in future blogs.) And Anthony followed up his 3 publications with a detailed blog, ‘You Can’t Build a Business Case for Enterprise Mashups’.

And there’s more. Through a day-long series of Twitter tweets, the SD Times announced the winners of their annual ‘SD Times 100’ Award. The winners in their ‘Mashup’ category included JackBe, Serena and, a bit surprisingly, Tibco. We’re hoping the editors of the SD Times give us a bit of insight into the inclusion of Tibco when they publish the formal awards article on June 15.

Finally, I am happy to say that JackBe made it’s contribution to the week's enterprise mashup maelstrom. First, we released the Spring 2009 edition of our multi-award-winning enterprise mashup platform, Presto 2.7. And we simultaneously announced the Share Your Mashup Macro Contest.  You can grab the free Developer Edition of Presto 2.7 and participate in the Mashup Macro Contest on our Mashup Developer Community.

What more could ya want in just 4 days? After all this, I can’t wait to see what next week is gonna be like. Don’t blink.

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Smash the Silos, Mash the SOA, Share the Mashups…

This is my first ‘back-to-reality’ blog in a while. With so much talk about Web 2.0, social networking, visibility, accountability and transparency, lately it’s easy to lose sight of some of the practical day-to-day problems we have to constantly address. And if there is one persistent problem that won’t go away (and seems to be getting worse), it’s software “silos.”

In the physical world, silos are nicely contained structures that hold and protect things from the elements. There’s usually only a single way in and single way out. In software silos contain data we need but also make it difficult to get at.

Sadly, too much software ends up becoming a silo. That’s because requirements almost always revolve around solving a specific set of business problems at a specific point-in-time. Later, as the business grows and requirements change, we end up with a bunch of siloed systems that don’t talk to each other and most likely never will. In the end, we’re forced into the Excel-based manual mashup based on multiple systems of record and a copy/paste approach just to get basic-but-important answers from the data deluge.

But it isn’t hopeless. The Smash/Mash/Share approach is a quick way to build on your current architecture and do it in an agile, forward-thinking way.

Let’s start by examining the real nature of problem through a real-world example from one of my customers (who shall remain nameless). Let me know if any of this sound familiar:

I have a ten year old HR system that contains valuable information I use every day. Suddenly I have a new requirement to match my HR data with my sales forecast data (and related production resource needs) to get a picture of my future hiring needs.

I can’t get at the HR data without going through clunky, ten-year-old application client-server UIs. I’m forced to copy and paste the data into Excel. Similarly, my sales data is in our new custom Sales Automation system, which is only Browser based and has no export facility.

And once all my copying/pasting is done, I have copies of data that are already beginning to diverge from the systems-of-record they were copied from. Any real projections I put together are instantly suspect.

And if you think your warehouse/datamart, portal, or middleware systems will solve this problem, think again. In my experience, they have become simply more silos.

You’re going to have to look to newer Web 2.0 technologies that are built around agility and speed and don’t require months and years of required IT development. Even ‘America’s CIO’, Vivek Kundra has started looking to Web 2.0 solutions for answers.

Fortunately, IT has been using Service oriented architecture (SOA) as an architectural technique to expose silos as services. This doesn’t entirely fix the problem, of course, because only a Java/Flex/Visual Studio developer could consume a SOA WSDL. Now you just have silos with nicely standardized doors. But it's a step in the right direction.

That’s were mashups fit in. I like to think of SOA as silo smashers and Mashups as SOA mashers. Deepak Alur wrote a great blog that described “mashables” as services (like the aforementioned SOA WSDLs) that have been made mashup-ready.

Last, it wouldn’t be ‘Web 2.0’ if we didn’t enable easy sharing and collaboration. Lately it seems that everyone has agreed the best way for users to see and share data is via Widgets. (Of course, widgets that sit in front of mashups are better called ‘Mashlets’).

So there you have it: Silos are meant to be smashed. SOA is meant to be mashed. And Mashups are meant to shared. Like this:

The Smash/Mash/Share approach results in an agile platform from which users can solve unforseen problems in a agile, open way. This kind of information ecosystem lets people create and share in a way that can ultimately result in a powerful network effect.

Silos: 0, Smashers/Mashers/Sharers: 1 (and then some).

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Mashups in Action: Connecting the Sales and Marketing Dots

A friend recently said I was the 'king of repurposing'. I am not entirely sure if he was referring to my blog about reuse as an important step in the Mashup lifecyle, or if he was was referring to my life-long quest to teach others how to reuse content (like this blog) whereever and whenever possible. Regardless, it reminded me to write this Mashup in Action blog.

As you might know, we have written a number of blogs about Mashups in Action over the last few years. A few of my favorites case studies include Thomson Reuters (part 1 and part 2), The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and Accival.

But this Mashup In Action is special. It's MINE.

Like every good marketer, I want to help my sales guys find, nurture, and ultimately close deals. We use many media channels to do that and we have great metrics on the early parts of the process until the moment we hand the prospective customer over to the sale folks. Why? Because then we are focused on their problems, and our proposal to address them. We (sales and marketing collectively) often miss subsequent interactions our prospective buyer has with the marketing channels that got them interested in the first place.

I've seen this same disconnect occur in every organization I have ever worked for. So my mashup addresses this quintessential marketing-and-sales problem: matching prospects in the sales pipeline to their subsequent interactions with our marketing channels. Afterall, if you've got a deal in the pipeline, wouldn't you want to know that your prospective customer just visited your company's website? And what they looked at? And for how long?

Here's a recording of my Marketing-and-Sales Mashup given by JackBe's Deepak Alur on stage at the Web 2.0 Expo a few weeks back:



This mashup gives my sales folks some great intelligence on their sales prospects. It helps them understand what parts of the corporate website that individuals in the prospect company visited, what features/modules/functions they may have liked/disliked, and perhaps even what medium (video, print, blog, etc.) was the 'stickiest'. Equally important, it helps us marketing folks understand the real influence we are having (or not having) on sales prospects.

I know this kind of problem isn't universal. It is less prevalent in organizations that used highly-integrated all-in-solutions (like Eloqua, perhaps). But there always seems to be one more source of information you want to connect to the prospective customer. 'Just one more thing' is always on the lips of a good sales rep.

I love a good hypothetical demonstration as much as the next guy but nothing can match a real-world applications like these. Oh, and because of this, my sales guys love me. Now that is priceless.

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Spreadsheet data is dead; not live. Don’t try to Recover(y) it!

Whenever you copy data into spreadsheet you instantly render it 'dead'. In other words, you severed its connection to the source and in essence created copy of the real data. This may be fine if you’re doing historical analysis and trust that the data is valid. But it isn't fine if the data always changes and the source/timeliness of the data is as important as the data itself.

Here’s a great example: Recovery data. As part of the Recovery effort billions of dollars are flowing to the government agencies such as FDA, HUD, HHS, etc. These agencies get the money and distribute it. But they are also the ones responsible for reporting on the data internally, ‘upternally’ (a word I made up to denote reporting up the agency chain) and externally (to the public). Multiply all the agencies times the number of distributions times the frequency of data changes and all of a sudden the government has a major data problem.

Welcome to the ‘Decade of the Data’.

We know that this effort is being coordinated at www.recovery.gov and President Obama has appointed Vivek Kundra as Federal CIO. I’m a big Vivek fan and applaud his past efforts on data visibility work in the DC government. His zest for innovation and data transparency (such as Apps for Democracy) is inspiring in a public servant.

So like any good citizen, I went searching for the Recovery data and discovered all the weekly Excel Recovery reports. It’s great to see the data making it’s way to the public but I’m troubled by the notion of having this data put out as Excel. What happens when the data changes? Do I wait for the next spreadsheet that updates the prior spreadsheet’s data? It’s easy to see that this data is dynamic and ever-changing. Manual reconciliation just won’t do. Oh, since Excel is a manual process, mistakes in the data can easily make their way into the reports.

The problem is seductively simple: Spreadsheets are so ubiquitous and so easy to use we tend to use it for just as many wrong things as good things. Specifically, Excel is not the right tool to manage real-time data. Worse still, spreadsheet data is not governed, not secure and not easy to aggregate with lots of other spreadsheets. Excel fails to meet 3 of the ‘5Cs’ of enterprise mashups.

I think it is easy to define the exact characteristics we need for true Recovery data visibility across the entire government. And here’s why: when it comes to live data across multiple sources, the value in this data is not the individual set of numbers, but rather the ability to look at the data aggregated, sliced and diced, geographically transposed (i.e. on a map), temporally depicted (can you say timeline?), and any other way we need to see it right now. This means speed in creating and visualizing the data is just as important as access to the data.

And if you think spreadsheets, data warehouses or portals can do this, think again. My fellow blogger Chris Warner often talks about his 'Dead-and-Deadly Data Matrix’ that I think nicely lays out how other enterprise technologies fit into the ‘Live and Secure’ information management spectrum.

There’s really only one way to do this and that’s using enterprise mashup technology. Enterprise mashup platforms (EMPs) are built exactly for this purpose: to provide the fastest way to interact and visualize data from multiple disparate sources in real-time and safely. They do it in hours and days, not weeks, months or years. And EMPs plug directly into the authoritative data sources and provide the necessary security and governance to make the data available and visible internally and externally.

And true EMPs let you publish the mashups as REST/XML services as well as mashup widgets (we call them 'Mashlets') that can land in your 1.0 portal, 2.0 portals (like Netvibes and iGoogle), collaboration platforms (like Sharepoint and Jive), mobile devices (like the iPhone) and even back into Excel as a live data source.  And that’s exactly what users want.  They want to have the data and visualization where they work, not where we want them to work.

The ‘Decade of the Data’ is definitely here. Let’s just make sure we do it the right way.

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Mashing Oracle without Oracle

As an ex-Oracle guy of 5 years, I know that Oracle-bashing is an enticing pastime. As proof, consider how folks like Paul Greenberg and Dennis Howlett have recently taken Oracle to task for their general 'failure to innovate'. I am generally not one 'pile on' and I certainly do not wish Oracle any ill will (JackBe is a proud Oracle partner and, personally, some of my closest friends earn their livelihood there).

But I stumbled across Oracle's corporate blog site a few days ago and I must say that it truly surprised me when I couldn't find 'mashup' in their blog tag cloud. Sure, a few blogs mention the term, but there are precious few that give the topic any real attention.

Any dedicated Oracle-watcher knows that they have no product, or concise feature-set within an existing product, to enable the virtuous circle of mashups. Considering that Oracle is the leader in data-driven software and manufacturers much the data-creating, data-management and data-reporting products in the world, how can mashups NOT be on Oracle's radar?

Luckily, those who want to bring some mashup agility and efficiency into their organizations can get help from places other than Redwood Shores.  I recently put a camera in front of Danny Malks, JackBe's VP of Application Platform and got him to walk through the fundamental value of mashup for Oracle-driven enterprises. Here's his 3-minute walk-through of mashups for enterprises that use Oracle (a little or a lot):



And I can tell you that Danny's example is just the tip of the iceberg. JackBe's Chief Oracle Mechanic, Karthic Thope, recently showed off a killer 5-part mashup that included Oracle Siebel, Oracle Peoplesoft, and Oracle E-Business Suite, all secured through Oracle's LDAP and all of it delivered to Oracle WebCenter. You can check out the 15-minute demo at http://www.jackbe.com/videos/JackBe-MashupsForOracle.mov (be patient, it is a very big video).  This is, in my studied opinion, a true example of an enterprise mashup.

I know that some might say 'Oracle has that kind of stuff on its roadmap'. Perhaps. An organization of Oracle's size always has a lot of promise. But 'just wait' is no longer a workable reply and Oracle has a lot of things on its plate. I wrote about this simple quandry almost 18 months ago, asking 'how long do you wait while Oracle is executing on its massive product integration plans'?

And since that post, I think it is an understatement to say that our world has changed drastically. Now a 6- or 12-month delay can truly mean the difference between a company in the black and a company on the block. Organizations need to find a way to innovate in the fastest, most agile way today.

JackBe will be showing Oracle Mashups at Collaborate 09 in Orlando in May.  Stop by our booth.  We'd love to mash with you there. No waiting.

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