Mashups can turn any Enterprise into a Superorganism

A few nights ago I watched a very interesting piece on the Discovery Channel about ant colonies called ‘Ant Wars’.  (Give me a few more lines and you’ll understand why this has anything to do with IT, enterprises or Mashups).  I was awe-struck with the way that an ant colony behaves as one unified being rather than millions of individuals - some ants perform one function, which other ants use to their advantage so as to be able to perform their function more easily, and so on, and so on. 

The commentator mentioned how scientists consider an ant colony to be a “Superorganism”.  The Wikipedia, as usual, had a helpful description of the term: ‘A superorganism is an organism consisting of many organisms…where division of labour is highly specialised and where individuals are not able to survive by themselves for extended periods of time’.  

Without much apparent centralized coordination and without any one individual leader barking-out precise orders to the individuals, each ant performs their own task in what appears to be a seamless orchestration of actions towards the achievement of a much larger purpose – that of survival of the colony.

As I have said many times, I see Mashups everywhere.  So I got to thinking that…

…with the adoption and use of mashup technologies, enterprises evolve into a kind of Superorganism where individuals create mashups to solve particular problems and by doing so create an environment of re-use where others can more easily solve subsequent, perhaps more complex, problems.

As the leading Mashup vendor, we are lucky to be a front-and-center witness to many cases where, with the use of our Presto Enterprise Mashup Platform, individuals in organizations are able to easily and economically take data from many different applications built by enterprise IT departments and mash it up with other services to solve their own problem. Then, those services are re-used and built upon by others to solve similar yet different problems.

This beautiful “ballet” of solution solving and application building happens with little planned coordination and appears to occur naturally without the central planning usually required. A Superorganism indeed.