Defining Enterprise Mashups

A few weeks ago JackBe’s CEO and Co-Founder, Luis Derechin, had the opportunity to represent the Web 2.0 industry on a major television network. When mainstream media outlets like Fox Business News start giving your product and your industry primetime coverage, you know you've passed a milestone.

During the interview, Luis was asked to describe ‘what that is’ and to give a ‘mainstream example’. Now I am not here to critique my boss (I am not that foolhardy). But I will tell you that Luis thinks he could have done a better job of defining enterprise mashups in a meaningful way for the uninitiated, non-technical business audience. So the boss asked his team to noodle it and that’s the topic I am interested in discussing here. How do you define ‘enteprise mashup’?
The simple word ‘mashup’ is complicated enough. You’d think with all the media and analyst coverage that there would be a simple, unified definition. Sadly, you’d be wrong on that one.

There are almost as many uses of the word ‘mashup’ as there are experts. And the term is all too common outside the high-tech industry as well. It’s popular in the world of music remix (this is where the word originated, in fact) but I’ve also seen it used by everyone from Sports Illustrated to the coupon-clipping Mashup Mom. I’ve even seen the word used on the back of a children's cereal box.

And it gets more complicated once you add the word ‘enterprise’ to the mix. When defining the enteprise mashups, it just doesn’t seem sufficient to say that ‘it’s a mashup in the enterprise’. A self-referential definition like that only seems to lead to more questions. It’d be more useful to have a self-supporting definition, I think.

Almost 2 years ago we went to great lengths to define a mashup. Today, with 2 years of enterprise mashup implementation experience behind us, we often say that enterprise mashups are:

‘Dynamic web-based applications that combine multiple data sources in real-time for increased awareness and improved decision-making while meeting the stringent governance and data security requirements of enterprises.’

Not bad, I think. But we need something a bit sexier for the next time we end up on TV. Remember, our goal is to craft something for the non-techy, the non-insider, the uninitiated. In a recent Twitter conversation with Web 2.0 Strategist Dion Hinchcliffe I gave him the 140-character definition: ‘Web 2.0 meets Excel’. His reply: ‘Now define Web 2.0’. Fair enough, we gotta find a definition that is not just for the insiders.

How about defining enterprise mashups by example? JackBe has no shortage of ‘Mashups in Action’, including projects in government (the Defense Intelligence Agency), publishing (Thomson Reuters), shipping/logistics (Inttra), and banking (Accival), to name a few. But I’d hate to use any single example for fear of having the listener pigeonhole enteprise mashups into one or two industries.

We could define mashups by exclusion. For instance, mashups are not ESBs, BI, portals or fancy spreadsheets. Enterprise mashups complement all of these technologies, certainly, but they have distinct qualities from these technologies that set them apart.  Unfortunately for our purposes today, I think the list of 'nots' is too long and cumbersome to be a useful defining tool.

Last, there is the always the ‘do nothing’ option. In other words, we could use the now-famous (but somewhat paraphrased) quote from late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, ‘I can't define it, but I know it when I see it!’.

Somehow I don’t think my boss would think of this last as my best effort. So, let me punt it to you… How do you define an enterprise mashup?

-----------

Update 03-12-2009: We've had so many great responses to this topic that we started a 'Beat the CEO' contest on our Mashup Community: http://www.jackbe.com/enterprise-mashup/blog/announcing-beat-ceo-contest.  Define 'enterprise mashups' for the beginner.  Our weekly favorites get a $50 Amazon gift card and the honorary title of 'Mashup CEO'.