Let's Put an End to 'Swivel Chair Integration'

I originally published this post on my 'Enterprise Mashups in Action' blog at eBizQ. I got some great feedback and decided to repost it for the loyal readers here. I hope you find it as interesting to read as I found to write.

Ending the Reign of the Swivel Chair: The Biggest Business Problem Enterprise Mashups Solve

Interactive Data Corp (IDC) published a report a few years ago titled 'The Hidden Costs of Information Work'. In it they reported that 'searching for and analyzing information both consume 24% of the typical information worker's time'.

IDC referred to these areas as 'relatively straightforward candidates for better automation'. I couldn't agree more. And with the volume of data doubling every 18 months, I'd venture to say this statistic is getting even worse. We're not getting less silo'ed, we're actually becoming more silo'ed. With all the mergers and acquisitions and SaaS offerings we've heard a continuous flow of horror stories of multiple systems managing everything from accounting, marketing and sales to customer support.

In short, we're not getting any better at helping our knowledge workers do their job. Instead these critical thinkers resort to "swivel chair integration," going from screen to screen (or if you're in the browser, tab-to-tab) copying and pasting data from one system to another. Not for data entry, but rather lookup and correlation to turn the data into information that supports their decision-making.

Of course, if these source systems were integrated, they wouldn't have to "swivel." But the reality is the systems they rely on are not integrated and with ever-shrinking IT budgets they never will be. And as IT gives these problems less attention, I think these important decision-makers are getting squeezed a little more every day, with more and more of their critical 'decision time' being replaced by simple 'gather' time.

In fact, I believe that silo'ed systems are so ubiquitous that many organizations have simply given up trying to integrate them. But our knowledge workers still have to make decisions based on all this data, so what do we do?

Luckily, silo'ed data needed for informed decisions are a sweet spot for new, '2.0-style' information technologies like enterprise mashups. Enterprise mashups are tuned to easily and quickly gather data from many systems and presented in order to allow for real-time decision making. Here is a real-world example that follows the basic enterprise mashup pattern (extrapolated from a popular 'Data Center Mashup' video by Steve Graham, a major contributor to Apache Axis and now a Software Architect at the University of Chicago):

Problem: The IT Support team spends a significant amount of time analyzing software errors, trying to determine if the source of the problem is hardware-related, software-related or an end-user issue. The team needs better insight into the status of hardware and software assets on the network to help correlate these assets with the error tickets. The issues may be reported or discovered by the users, via SNMP traps, in application or hardware logs, or a combination of the three.

Example Data Sources:
1. HP Operations Manager: for gathering SNMP Traps for network monitoring
2. BMC Remedy Service Desk: for managing trouble tickets and incidents
3. Custom application #1: with all hardware server related information and IPs
4. Custom application #2: with all software assets and server deployment information

Decision Time Frame: As quickly as possible.

Impact: The longer it takes to isolate the problem, the more time, money and opportunity will be lost. Depending on the 'mission criticalness' of the software, the impact can be severe.

Solution: Real-time enterprise mashups tie directly into all four data sources, with a mechanism support engineered to locate information via IP address, server name, software system name and trouble ticket numbers. They then use information to filter and correlate from these sources and present information via a dashboard that shows the correlated network, hardware and software errors associated with each trouble ticket.

If you look at the above description and had to sum the problem up in a short statement, you'd probably say something like "The support engineers need data from multiple disparate systems to solve their problems. Since these systems are not integrated, they will have to do a lot of manual work to analyze the data across multiple systems. Let's make sure they all have swivel chairs!"

Hopefully, you get the idea. Enterprise mashups are a great way to solve the age-old integration-by-swivel-chair problem. Let's let the swivel chair return to its 'trusty but boring office companion' status.

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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.

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