06.12.08
Don’t Try This at Home
How often have you heard vendors extol their products as being so simple that people from the business side can take charge and configure their reports, manage their portals, or if you listen to all the enterprise mashup providers, that business people can assemble neat little personalized disposable apps without having to call on IT? We’ve seen our share of easy-to-use end-user tools that look pretty impressive, and at times have drank the Kool-Aid ourselves.
Reviewing the proceeding of a panel session at this past week’s Enterprise 2.0 conference, prolific BPM blogger Sandy Kemsley gave us a fresh shot of common sense. Commenting on a panel session that covered how mashups could consume data from basic, ubiquitous sources such as Atom/RSS feeds, SOAP, RESTful services, etc., Kemsley reminded us that when you put together mashups, the processes is akin to piecing together what we’d term jigsaw puzzle: you have to know something about how the pieces fit together. She stated that you need to consider the interfaces, and concluded, “Realistically, business users still can’t do mashups, in spite of what the vendors tell you…”
She stated that dragging and dropping is, literally, only the tip of the iceberg, as you need to know how those pieces may interact (isn’t that the point of doing a mashup?). Otherwise, if you just stick a two, three or more silo’ed data sources on your screen that don’t interact, you’re simply putting together a portal page, which may be OK in and of itself. It’s the difference between a dynamic mashup of a Google Map which shows the location of the sales leads that you overlaid atop it, or just a Google Map with a static table that doesn’t show where on the map those leads are. And, as we wrote after a conversation with Informatica’s Ashutosh Kulkarni a few months back, issues such as architectural integrity, customer privacy protection, or access control may not necessarily be forefront on the end user’s mind.
Admittedly, enterprise mashup providers like Serena and IBM remind us that their offerings provide protected sandboxes within which business users can mash safely vetted assets to limit or eliminate the possibility of data breaches. Clearly, mashups have the potential to make disposable applications more accessible to the rest of us. Just don’t forget to get some adult supervision.
Rene Bonvanie said,
June 12, 2008 at 6:45 pm
I can think of many applications that couldn’t and shouldn’t ever be built by business users. And I’m sure that every IT professional can think of an even longer list. But making that the basis of the argument that companies such as mine (Serena) are overstating the ease of use of Mashups is quite a stretch. It reminds me a lot of when business users started to program in Visual Basic or Lotus Notes in the nineties, and rapidly adopted Sharepoint later on. Sure, they screwed up a bunch of things, but at the same time they built many useful simple applications in the “long tail” that are still living long and prosperous lifes today. What’s being solved here is a simple labor problem – there will never be enough IT resources to resolve the backlog. So, do business users want to build Mashups? Maybe not. Can they? Maybe not. But will they? Absolutely! They always have and always will…