Social Glass

In a previous post I described an Enterprise 2.0 implementation roadmap. The last component in the roadmap is Enterprise Mashups. In a utopian world, enterprise mashups give the knowledge worker spreadsheet-like flexibility to dynamically create composite applications that suit his specific business needs. Companies like Kapow, Serena Software and IBM are building enterprise mashup engines, but none have reached this utopian state.

Dion Hinchliffe wrote a great post about challenges facing enterprise mashups. He identifies 10:

1. No Commonly Accepted Assembly Model
2. An Immature Services Landscape
3. The Splintering of Widgets
4. Management and Support of End-User Mashup Apps
5. Deep Support for Security and Identity
6. Data Quality and Accuracy
7. Version Management
8. Awareness and Realization of the Potential of Mashups by the Business Community
9. Low Levels of Support by Major Software Firms
10. Few Killer Demo Apps

In my professional life I’ve encountered obstacles around items 2 and 4 when discussing enterprise mashups with potential clients. We can show impressive demos, like IBM’s QEDWiki, but we’d need a seriously mature SOA to build the “widgets” a knowledge worker would use to create such a mashup (issue 2). And Dion asks who’s going to support these things once they break? “The IT department? The business units? Using what tools” (issue 4). Good question.

At the end of the day an enterprise must have a strong SOA initiative and support from IT before the value proposition behind enterprise mashups can be fully realized.

I discovered this “Enterprise 2.0″ thing in 2006 and thought, much like Dion, that 2007 would be the year of Enterprise 2.0. I’ve certainly been doing a lot of work within my firm and with clients on the topic and have been encouraged by the interest I’ve seen. But that’s really all it is at this point, “interest”.

So where are all of the Enterprise 2.0 implementations that we were expecting this year? It’s already the middle of May, and as far as I know there haven’t been any major announcements of large-scale E2.0 roll outs. But maybe that’s just it. Maybe there will never be any sudden, large-scale adoption from a major company. And to me this makes sense.

We talk about bottom-up adoption (a slow process), and in my experience this is exactly what’s happening. I spoke to another client about Enterprise 2.0 the other day, and while to most of them this was brand new, one member raised his hand and said they’d been using wikis, social networking and Google Map mashups across a few groups for a while. “Really, cool” - the others said. This revelation also helped legitimize what I was saying, as someone from within their organization had independently discovered these tools and found value in them without influence from me or my firm.

So, to answer my question, Enterprise 2.0 implementations are coming, quietly, slowly, and from the bottom-up.

I like the idea of enterprise mashups and am impressed with what IBM is doing with QEDWiki. I was explaining the concept of Rich Internet Applications to some prospective clients the other day and found they struggled with the idea until I drew a metaphor to Excel. Excel is a wildly popular spreadsheet application - everybody loves it. Knowledge workers use it for status reports, pricing, project planning, you name it. Back when I was a software engineer we often got requests to build web pages that “acted like Excel”.

Why is is so popular? Because it gives control to the user. It’s an application that allows the user to dynamically generate tools to help them do their jobs better. Given the un-restraining characteristics of this application and the fact that it’s so prevalent, why have we endeavored for so long to build business applications and knowledge sharing tools behave in the opposite fashion by imposing pre-determined constraints and rules?

Enterprise mashups, and even wikis and blogs, will succeed because they follow the same fundamental principles that Excel does. They presuppose very little about how knowledge workers do their jobs and are malleable enough to adapt to unforseen conditions.

After explaining it in this way to my audience I got a lot of nodding heads.