My speed notes from the speed geeking sessions are all on paper, so I’ll have to transcribe them later. In the meantime, however, I’m at the next session on enterprise mashups.
This was a bit slow-moving; I blame that on the post-lunch energy dip and the frenzy of speed-geeking that wore everyone out.
We talked around a number of subjects:
- Enterprise mashups have a focus on multiple data sources, especially unstructured data, acting in part as a replacement for manual cut-and-paste.
- Current IT development methodologies are not sufficiently agile to develop mashups, leading to the discussion about whether enterprise mashups should be done outside of IT: are mashups the next generation of end-user computing, replacing Excel and Access applications created by the business units? If so, who’s responsible for the result of the mashup, and for the underlying data sources?
- The current IT environment tends to be command+control, and doesn’t lend itself to enabling mashups to occur in the business units. They need to unlearn scarcity of computing resources, and learn abundance.
- What’s the boundary between EAI and mashups? What’s the boundary between business processes and social collaboration?
Hi Sandy,
I’ll be posting my notes on my blog from the camp later tonight – but I definitely see some similarities here to what I’ll be posting.
I think essentially there needs to be a major IT cultural shift from IT being the “holder” of the information to being the “enabler” of safe information for business users/analysts to consume within the mashup environment.
With all the legal issues and distribution rights of content starting to becoming a major issue in this area, I think IT managers and teams are going to have to start looking at how to educate and enable their teams to be more responsive to the shifting programming model as we see it.
Not going to happen overnight, definitely. But something to look at.
Good seeing you at lunch yesterday, and look forward to talking to you more.
Lauren
(still no good title)
IBM CTO Office
Information Management Group
Lauren, it was great to meet you as well — nothing better than sitting down to lunch with someone who says “I read your blog” as an opening line!
I agree that the role of IT needs to change: look after the security and accessibility of the data, while protecting non-IT types from doing “stupid” things with the data that might bring the server to its knees. Otherwise, give the business units the right tools and let them go to it — that’s what BPM is supposed to be about, too.