[As a preface to this blog, I want to give my apologies for being away from blogging for the last few months. I've been busy creating Enterprise Mashup software here at JackBe. Now that our software is production-ready, I'm looking forward to getting back to posting regularly and getting your feedback on my development efforts. Deepak.]
I was at the Mashup Ecosystem Summit organized by IBM at their offices in San Francisco last week. Our CTO, John Crupi, and our Chief Architect, Raj Krishnamurthy, also attended with me. It was an interesting mix of people from different backgrounds and companies all converging on the concept of Mashups. Jeff Nolan (ex-Teqlo, ex-SAP) gave an interesting talk about his experiences in a starting up a mashup company. Some notable points were: (lack of) availability of APIs; Do-it-yourself Data Formats; Performance can be a challenge; Need for strong visual composition tools; Lack of Standards. I think these are questions that this group will be able to tackle over time. (At least, I hope!)
At one point during the end of the meeting, someone asked: "What really is a Mashup?". This led to a brief but inconclusive discussion. Which goes to show how nascent this field is that even among the experts in the industry, there is still some uncertainty about how to define and qualify a mashup. (Coincidentally, JackBe has a webcast coming up on May 23 on this very topic: 'Enterprise Mashup Bootcamp: What, Why and How'. You can register for that webcast here.)
I managed to slip in a question at the Mashup Summit about how the group feels about Composite Applications which were a hot topic a year or more ago and how they relate (or not) to mashups. Predictably, there wasn't a big desire for this discussion. However, my own personal take is as follows. We in the SOA software industry have been busy implementing SOA in the enterprise over the last few years in our architecture and IT infrastructure. This effort in SOA has largely ignored the end users, and mostly focused on the IT and business stakeholders. Composite Applications are, in a way, IT efforts to provide integration of data, services and processes. While there has been a proliferation of services around the internet/intranet, users have no good tools to use them to do their job more effectively. Therefore, end users do not see much direct benefit of SOA or services or even composite applications.
These SOA/services/composite applications efforts are now undergoing an (r)evolutionary transformation. Enter mashups. And enter the users! The integration is now happening at a higher level in the application stack, much closer to the user. (This is also what Dion Hinchcliffe points out in his blog, where he talks about the 5 styles of mashups.)
There was also some question/opinions about security and how to govern mashups. I think there is no need to be overly paranoid about this. However, service access control is still important in an enterprise world of mashups. Consider that today users are already doing mashups, whether you like it or not. They are doing this mostly in their heads or in a spreadsheet, mostly manually and mostly in a tedious and time consuming way, and in a not-easy-to-replicate-or-teach manner. If the users have access to the data, you don't really have control on what they do with it in their heads or spreadsheets. So, why not make it easy for the users to do this, faster, more efficiently, collaboratively (so they can share their analysis/knowledge), and to do all this with the least amount of programming skills required (leaning towards no programming required). We are aiming for this at JackBe, as I am sure other vendors in the mashup space are.
Other notable topics of discussion at the Mashup Summit were:
- Microformats. My favorite topic. I think Microformats (www.microformats.org) are currently under rated/under used in an enterprise. Expect to see a lot of interesting things in this space in the coming months. We have a thing or two in the works about this as well at JackBe. (Also see Jeff Nolan's comments on this topic.)
- Mashup of Data vs. Processes. It is easy to confuse the two and it's important to remember they are not the same.
- Offline & Synchronization: Ross Mayfield of SocialText asked how important this feature is and whether there really are good use cases that demand this feature. He blogs on this (and related) topics quite a bit and has a interesting perspective.
Bottomline, we at JackBe believe that a mashup has to be user-focused and user driven (not IT driven). Let's stop searching for the killer app. The killer app is here and it is the User. Let's enable and empower them to do what they really can do with mashups.
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As "tacit" interactions replace more routine business activities and the scale and complexity of many corporations creep upward, the need to manage collaboration is growing. According to McKinsey, nearly 80 percent of the senior executives surveyed in a 2005 study said that effective coordination across product, functional, and geographic lines was crucial for growth. Yet only 25 percent of the respondents described their organizations as "effective" at sharing knowledge across boundaries.
Since the worth of a knowledge worker is what he/she knows or knows how to locate, there is a need to increase the pool of knowledge and sources in order to increase value. This relates to knowledge management as well--this is a corporate approach to identifying knowledge, who knows, and what can be archived.
The Tacit work is, to a great extent, self-managed. He or she is expected to know how to organize and manage his/her work. He/she is also expected to have knowledge or know where to find it. This means the Tacit worker comprises of four subgroups which can be mapped against their respective daily tasks. For relevance, the respective tasks have been expanded to include more specific tasks one would perform using software and Web-based tools.
Building (Developers) Create solutions that meet changing business needs by leveraging existing enterprise, partner, and public resources.
- Build self-service web apps
- Build Bill access & payment
- Build integrated on-line CRM/ERP apps
Acquiring knowledge (Data Gatherer) Need fast views of disparate information the majority of their time in the office, are very mainstream in their office looking for data.
- Search and retrieve disparate enterprise information
- Build analysis report views
- Share views with other team members
Designing (Power User) Builds situational solutions to further streamline daily tasks and shares these with others.
- Create presentation mashups
- Create next-gen portals and light analytics views
- Share views with team members
Making decisions (Knowledge Worker) Mild Analytics, Information search and data manipulation. Planning.
- Real-time & tailored information sharing
- Compose various data views
- Make decisions based on real time information
Why is this important? Tacit worker productivity increases in value when the needs of the worker (relevant data and effective use and access to knowledge) is supplied by the organization wishing to reap the benefits. It leads to greater worker efficiency reducing the cost in terms of time and energy of the respective Tacit worker. To accomplish these cost savings while maintaining worker effectiveness, the best alternative is one solution designed to be customized by the user to meet their own needs. The best technology solution is one that all Tacit workers of the organization can use to efficiently and effectively obtain or transfer knowledge. Can you say Enterprise Web 2.0?
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As we've mentioned in the past in this blog, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) is a JackBe customer and an avid adopter of Web 2.0 technologies. Just this past week I had the pleasure to speak on the CTO Panel at DODIIS Worldwide Conference in Chicago, the IT show sponsored by the DIA. It only took a few minutes on the exhibit floor to appreciate the emergence of Web 2.0 as a important initiative in government.
One of the mandates of John Howard, Deputy Associate Director of National Intelligence for Intelligence Community Enterprise Services (the title is very telling in itself!), is that users need to get information in their hands as quickly as possible without government red tape getting in the way. Executive mandates aside, the interest in Enterprise Web 2.0 within this community is not very surprising when you consider that Intelligence analysts are defacto Tacit workers. They are a great example of ad-hoc workers that do something different every day and benefit from correspondingly dynamic and adaptable supporting software systems.
Specifically, this community has shown great interest in using Ajax as an interaction technology and SOA as a business functionality-sharing technology. There's also a lot of buzz around mashups because, I believe, they see the value of ad-hoc integration. Two other issues that were frequently discussed were security and governance. How does an organization, government or not, support common credential authentication and propagation? And these aren't merely rhethorical questions. We heard one speaker give a great practical example: they will support DEERS, a DOD X.509 common credential and attribute service, which is key for any workable multi-service consumption or mashup use. As each service has its own set of user credential, users would have to login to each service which would be unusable.
And like a lot commercial enterprises, the DOD is struggling with other strategic issues related to Web 2.0 technologies like SOA. As the CTO from JFCOM put it, they are already experiencing "SOA silos". Best practices and implementation rubrics are becoming crucial to avoid these kinds of problems. That might sound obvious but most of the big SOA vendors want to own the entire stack and 'integratation' often stops at their own product set. As Scott McNealy (CEO of Sun Microsystems and a keynote speaker at the Conference) said, "Integratable" is important. I couldn't agree more.
As always, the DIA (and the DOD in general) has a lot to teach us commercial folks.
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JackBe firmly believes that Enterprise Web 2.0 software must be user-centric, web-driven solutions that enable ad-hoc, user-driven collaboration and integration. Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking at the CSC Leading Edge Forum on "Making Web 2.0 Meaningful and Achievable". (If you're interested in the presentation, the slides and audio are available here.) It is always interesting to see how new, innovative concepts from the consumer world are adopted and adapted to the enterprise.
If Web 2.0 is about empowering users to share and collaborate, then how will this principle be worked into the enterprise? Interestingly, both the Economist ('Serious business: Web 2.0 goes corporate') and McKinsey ('How businesses are using Web 2.0') have given Enterprise Web 2.0 some of their attention recently. These reports are definitely worth reading. Based upon their surveys of architects and CIOs, the first wave of Web 2.0 projects in the enterprise will focus upon wikis and mashups (and some supporting service-enablement efforts). That's good, practical stuff.
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