Enterprise Mashups: The New Integration Front/Tier

'Integration for the user and by the user'. That's often how we describe enterprise mashups. Is this right? Historically, integration has been an IT-driven process involving integrating large systems, wrapping and reusing existing systems, connecting them together. And, as we all know by now, the paradigm for this is SOA.

SOA-style architectures are based on open standards, such as WSDL, RSS and REST. These technologies enable us to use standards to dramatically reduce integrations costs. The good news is that SOA killed the proprietary adapter market and the business unit may reap the rewards. The bad news is IT has a huge legacy integration backlog and can't even come close to implementing SOA for the business unit.

This creates an even bigger problem for the knowledge worker (also known in McKinsey-speak as the 'tacit' worker) who needs an ever-changing set of things integrated in an ever-decreasing amount of time. This might be non-tech integration via 'cut and paste' or more sophisticated 'drag and drop' integration. You can think of this integration as situational or 'user-driven' integration. It's what IT can't (and shouldn't!) deliver.

But contrary to some opinions, tacit workers don't integrate for the hell of it. They integrate because they have no other choice. Today, their standard integration software is Excel. They create information by combining disparate information from databases, email, CRM, ERP, etc and integrate it using Excel and collaborate by email the spreadsheet, time and time again.

Every day I monitor ten RSS news feeds looking for news about my current and potential customers stored in Salesforce.com. I'm paid to gather information about my customers from disparate Web sources to help drive our product strategy. But now I finally have technology which helps me integrate this disparate information into an instant application. Not the full-blown application we're used to, but rather a micro application that does just what I need it to do with the data I consumed. Welcome to Web 2.0. More specifically, welcome to Enterprise Mashups.

It's this combined information that I use to make daily decisions that establishes my value to my company. The added value happens when I can instantly share this rich information with others (aka collaborate). And what if I can expose my creation to others so they can add value by simply consuming what I did and integrating with more? The answer is I get something IT could never give me and something others like me would kill for. This is the real future of integration. The real future of Web based empowerment. This is the real power and future of enterprise mashups.