Social Glass

Joe McKendrick hit on a great point when he asked “Is Gartner telling us to ‘make sure there are adults in the room’ before launching into Web 2.0 activities?”. Joe goes on to point out that “All the excitement around various aspects of Web 2.0 may truly be a distraction from SOA”. Mashups, or web-based applications that bring together functionality from multiple systems to do something in aggregate that they do not do on their own (think twittervision), require a mature service oriented architecture from which said functionality can be sourced.

We talk so much about widgets and web oriented architectures (the visual aspect of SOA) that we forget about the significant investment that companies must make to deploy enterprise mashups. I touched on this a few weeks ago, but Dion Hinchliffe mentioned that an immature services landscape is a major barrier to mashup adoption. He writes “Mashups are predicated upon the ready preexistence of ready-to-use Web services and network APIs which are ready to be used to build on top of.”

In other words, if I want to create a Customer Search widget I’ll need to have first developed an interface into my customer database of record that, oh yeah, was programmed in Fortran in 1978. That costs money, and in my experience a lot of companies just aren’t there yet.