Tree House Mashups

From time to time we invite guests to share their skills and experiences with us. Today we have a guest from within JackBe, Shawn Pike, who has dozens of conversations daily with our partners, our customers and our prospective customers. In his inaugural guest post Shawn shares his unique perspective on mashups and the 'leverage whatcha have' notion of mashups in the enterprise.

It always amazed me the personal projects that my father’s construction partner Dennis would undertake at his home in upstate New York. As a ten year-old boy, I remember marveling at the mammoth of a tree house he had built for his three children, which rivaled any but the Swiss Family Robinson attraction at Disney World. Do you remember the tour?

I remember the crazy collection of ladders, ropes and slides used as entrances or exits; the different tiles adorning parts of the main room; the stools and desks for studying and the shelving for books; the cupboard holding midday snacks, screened windows and a working door. I was too busy exploring the place to hear my father ask about the materials and cost. I certainly heard all about it later.

On the ride home, my father made sure to drive home the point of Dennis’s true ingenuity and genius; nearly the whole tree house had been constructed with materials he already had or could get for free. He was famous for leveraging what he had and improvising instead of running out to the hardware store. Nowadays I can't help but think of the enterprise mashup world and the propensity of mashups to leverage current data and systems, instead of building from scratch.

Over the past year, I have spoken with thousands of the top executives in the commercial and government sectors about their current methods of application development and heard repeatedly about the lack of budget and resources. Curiously, never have the expectations been higher as the users demand even more timely and accurate data to make quick and informed decisions. No doubt we need more people with the “Dennis mentality” in the IT world to meet these new organizational challenges.

We just had a financial system meltdown where the absence of real-time, situational awareness no doubt contributed to the catastrophe. Our government is pursuing the greatest transparency and accountability initiative in history. Our militaries face asymmetrical threats where intelligence is the game-changer. And the demand for organizations to collaborate is greater than ever before. How do we meet these challenges with limited budgets and resources in an economic atmosphere where organizational employees are cut or forced to work less in order to save money?

Mike Ogrinz, the author of Mashup Patterns, Mike Orgrinz, recently wrote in a blog, “Legacy resources are everywhere, and they can easily be incorporated in today’s new mashups.” I couldn't agree more! I think the enterprise mashup paradigm starts on the right premise: stop thinking 'big and new' and start looking at your current stock of assets. Enterprise mashup solutions provide a way to leverage your current architectures, working with your existing data (whether internal or external to your organization), live natively in your current security infrastructure, and connect to the plethora of reporting and analysis tools you likely already have, all in order to innovate for much cheaper and faster than the common start-from-scratch methods. No assets should go unconsidered.

Enterprise mashup solutions (like JackBe's Presto) provide the easiest and safest way to quickly put together creative and dynamic applications for your users without interrupting your current IT operations. When the smoke clears from the economic downturn we presently are foraging through, I am guessing the IT organizations standing tall will be the ones with leaders who have the “Dennis mentality” and an EM solution in their tool kits.