Enterprise Mashups without Governance = 10 to Life

Darryl Taft at eWeek just published a good recap of the opening panel discussion from this week’s Webservices/SOA on Wallstreet Conference, ‘Enterprise Mashups For Wall Street – Leveraging SOA and Web 2.0’. I was also at the show and had a chance to listen to the panel discussion live. The best part of the discussion was when the conversation went down the path of Innovation versus Governance.

During this thread, an interesting statement was made by Rene Bonvanie, SVP of Marketing at Serena. Darryl wrote that Rene said; 'governance should take a back seat to innovation’. Boy, was this the wrong thing to say to a financial audience where governance is #1 on IT’s priority list! We all know if you don’t enforce governance in the financial services sector, you and your office mates may spend some some time in prison. Just ask the folks at Societe Generale about their US$7.14 billion fraud.

Of course innovation and governance are not mutually exclusive. Actually, when it comes to enterprise mashups, strong governance fosters innovation, not suppresses it. With strong governance in place, you can actually open up more data. And we’re very proud to say that we’ve been talking about governance from the day one, even making it the very centerpiece of our 5 rules to making mashups work in the enterprise.

JackBe’s enterprise mashup platform, Presto, is built on a deep security and governance foundation that ensures adherence to IT’s requirements while still empowering the business user with robust mashup capabilities. And coincidentally, we recently added even more governance functionality to Presto through our Presto Connector for HP SOA Systinet. We’re not talking about rhetoric here but a real, tangible governance solution for mashups.

Luckily, the other panel members didn’t have the same view as Bonvanie. They all believed governance was paramount and would actually accelerate innovation and SOA adoption. Cheers to them!

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The Conundrum of Business User 2.0

This might be a horrible case of parental pride, but I think my 6-year old son is a great example of the new ‘Gen 2.0’ business user. He surfs the kid-friendly Internet, he regularly finds and beats online games without any help from his daddy, and most importantly he cannot seem to understand why he can’t watch ‘Scooby Doo Meets Batman’ in any room in the house at any time he wants. In other words, he’s tech-savvy, he’s adept at picking up new apps, and he lives in a world where everything is available on-demand. I’d say he’s the future of every enterprise.

These are the folks that were born during the days of the first Macs, children during the rise of cable, teenagers during the boom years of the Internet, and pushed through college in the days of XM radio. So it’s not unreasonable to say that you already have huge ranks of new hires just like my son, with just about every one of your 24-year old management trainees fitting this faster-adopter, tech-savvy, on-demand personality profile. And they will reasonably expect that every piece of financial services data they hear about on the news would be available for mashing in a spreadsheet within minutes. The same goes for your newest customer services reps. Sales executives. Logistics managers. All the same. All expect their metaphorical Scooby Doo data to be on their desktop instantly, without excuses.

Easy enough to imagine but it can be a heavy burden for enterprises that spend 80%+ of their IT budget on maintenance of 10-, 20- and even 30-year old applications. Hardly apps that could be described as ‘agile’. And, as I heard one tech journalist put it recently, your typical 50+ year-old CXO doesn’t have a lot of empathy for this type of real-time, tech-heavy employee (afterall, that CXO didn’t spend his entire childhood on a computer like his newest wave of employees did).

But that CXO should care. Because their Business User 2.0 employees are likely to be the most innovative and innovation is generally thought to be where the bulk of corporate growth comes from. Put a big sign above their heads that says ‘Growth Happens Here’. And these new users have other appreciable qualities. They are technically inclined, more than any prior generation of users by an order of magnitude. Want them to learn a new application? No problem, they do that every month on their 360/PSP/Wii/iPhone. Worried about them writing a macro? Collaborating with others on a wiki? Mashing their own data into their personal portlets? Commenting on a blog? No need to worry.

But therein lies the conundrum: Business User 2.0, unlike previous waves of employees, will do it themselves if they can’t get what they need from the corporate infrastructure. That’s good for them and maybe good for the organization overall…but bad for IT (they get marginalized), bad for corporate governance (hard to govern what you do not provide), and bad for the CXO (who can’t manage what he doesn’t provide or support). Business User 2.0 places entirely new, and perhaps greater, demands (just like my son!) from a technology and management point of view. Luckily, they can also give you a much more flexible and adaptable workforce.

And if you're looking for a bright, agile, hard-working Scooby-Doo fan for your management trainee program, I'll have a great candidate for you in about 16 years.

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Crisis 2.0: Menace or Turning Point?

There’s a crisis, you say? We are witnessing crises taking hold in many verticals including housing, financial services, manufacturing and others. There's the housing crisis. The bond crisis. The gas crisis. And these macro-crises are event beginning to put pressure on IT, where we're seeing something of a mini-crisis of confidence with IT pros pondering what might happen to IT projects like SOA.

Why is crisis good? Because it’s in the proverbial pressure-cooker that real innovation occurs. Darwin wrote it. Kanye West sang it. Most recently, Ron Tolido at Capgemini blogged it in “Crisis! Hurray, Crisis!”. Ron makes a very defensible case that companies that face crises are more apt to look for innovative solutions to truly help them leapfrog the status quo and solve longstanding problems that had been previously ignored or solved by long-term, big-ticket investments.

On a more personal level, we have witnessed an upsurge of interest in mashup technologies in the last few months and, to be candid, we weren’t quite certain there was any single cause. But Ron’s post led me to my AHA! moment. Mashups are front-and-center for many of today’s most innovative enterprise leaders because they need innovations like mashups to hack a path back to stability, growth and profitability. In fact, some have begun to posit that service-driven solutions have the opportunity to really shine instead of being a victim of those cutbacks that are so common in times of crisis.

This reminds me of a saying attributed to Jawarhalal Nehru, one of the leaders for independence in 1940’s India:

“A leader or a man of action in a crisis almost always acts subconsciously and then thinks of the reasons for his action.”

Innovative leaders are now hearing that little voice in back of their head that’s demanding different approaches and technologies than what they did in the past. If crisis drives need and need drives adaptation, then crisis is good.

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