Mashups and "The Future of Work" in Enterprise 2.0

[As a preface to this blog, I think I should take a moment and introduce myself. I am JackBe’s CEO and co-founder. Until today, I have been leaving the blogging to some of JackBe's better known (and more loquacious) team-members. However, as Enterprise Mashups continue to garner more and more attention, I've come to the conclusion that the global Enterprise Mashup conversation might benefit a bit from my perspective on occasion.]

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Harvard professor Andrew McAfee, originator of the term 'Enterprise 2.0', has introduced another wonderful set of ideas in his latest blog entitled The Great Decoupling. Andrew’s blog is a discussion about MIT’s Tom Malone’s book The Future of Work, which deals with information flows and decision rights and how these are impacted in enterprise by technology.

McAfee mentions that (and Malone’s book details) that information can now more freely move about in a company due to the ease of communication and cost-effective nature and availability of broadband internet access and processing power. He then goes on to explain the phenomenon of “lateralization” replacing “centralization” when analyzing information exchanges and uses drawings (like the ones pictured here) to explain the differences.

McAfee makes the point that:

“Malone’s theory, however, goes much farther than just outlining how information flows change. It also predicts how decision right allocations will change as a result. His thesis is a simple and powerful one: decision rights will also become more lateralized as information costs plummet, leading to greater power and autonomy at lower levels within a hierarchy -- in short, greater decentralization.“

Why is this at all interesting to me (and you), you ask? Well, all of this seems to certainly be relevant to the nature and definition of mashups. After all, a mashup is the result of taking disparate and highly available pieces of information and “mashing” them together to create a new piece of information. In essence Malone seems to be describing, among other things, the reason why mashups have arisen and the importance that mashups have in today’s IT environment.

However, McAfee’s knowledge about enterprises and how they work lead him to disagree with the practical nature of some of Malone’s ideas. McAfee makes it a point to highlight how new rules about distribution and access to information as well as the possibility to interact with it will need to be put in place in order for these ideas to be implemented in enterprise.

“Most of what I’ve seen recently strongly indicates that the sudden near-disappearance of information costs is bringing up a fascinating and consequential set of questions for organization designers and corporate leaders. They now have the freedom to place decision rights where they wish without being hampered by information costs. What are the long-term consequences of this great decoupling? Rather than a steady rise in decentralization, I think we’re going to see an extended period of innovation and experimentation. I think Malone might well be right that the "market share [of centralized management] is likely to decrease," but I also think there will be strong movement in the opposite direction -- toward more centralization of some decision rights—and a lot of very interesting hybrid models, some so interesting that they’ll look like science fiction.”

In essence McAfee is making the point that for enterprises, a hybrid model needs to be put in place. One in which information is available as long as proper governance, auditing and tracking can be established. Simply put, without the possibility of governance, no enterprise will formally allow nor motivate such an exchange and hence the decentralization of decision rights cannot occur.

This is very similar to the point that JackBe has been making about the need for enterprise IT infrastructure to evolve so as to be able to establish and enforce the necessary governance and create an environment of trust. JackBe's own John Crupi and Deepak Alur have gone to great lengths (like here and here) to make and illustrate the point that the difference between consumer and enterprise mashups has to do with the fact that consumers can have free access and free rights, but enterprises must have the ability to create and manage their circle of trust.

JackBe's enterprise mashup experiences in dealing with many large enterprises to deploy enterprise mashup solutions makes it clear that the hybrid model that Andrew McAfee describes is required. Furthermore, we believe that all enterprise IT stacks will need to evolve to ensure that these new capabilities can be put in place. Fortunately for us, we saw this coming and have created an Enterprise Mashup Platform that strongly focuses on governance and trust issues, and one that is complementary to existing platforms.

The future is here!