Enterprise mashups: save us from the hype
I know I'm going to come across like the annoying old fella who sits in the corner at any fun event and mumbles to himself about how rubbish things have got since men started wearing their hair long - but in the spirit of my esteemed colleague's
emerging manifesto for industry analysis (he hasn't forced me to sign up yet but it's probably only a matter of time) I thought I should at least make a (possibly vain) attempt to push back at some of the unthinking evangelism that's going on out there concerning Web 2.0 ideas and their application to enterprise IT.
In the name of education, not evangelism: let's scotch the idea of "enterprise mashups".
What started it all was reading Phil Wainewright over at InfoWorld on "
Enterprise Mashups: a lesson from history". His post makes a lot of sense. What I object to is the title - which I acknowledge is not Phil's doing: there are plenty of other people poking at this idea (
Eric Newcomer of Iona recently led me to
Joe McKendrick - and then onto an IBMer,
Bob Zurek).
Dion Hinchcliffe is even talking about the "mashosphere"! Please, let's not give any more credence to this idea than it already has in the crazed kool-aid drinking dens of Silicon Valley.
Now here at MWD we are solidly with
Grady Booch on SOA -
SOA is, first and foremost, about the A part of the acronym (architecture). Organizations who already have a solid approach to architecture will likely do reasonably well with SOA; organizations who already have a broken architecture and/or a broken architectural governance practice will likely fail with SOA and then blame SOA on all their problems ... There are places where SOA is suitable, and places where it is not...
There's too much association between the idea of a "mashup" and SOA. And as I've
written before, there's really no comparison: mashups are inherently *not* about architecture. Nor are they about services. But with Grady Booch's comments in mind, does that mean that where SOA doesn't work, mashups are the answer for enterprises looking to integrate IT resources?
The answer for me is a firm "no" - and that's because mashups embody everything, from an IT policy and architecture point of view, that enterprises are today desperately trying to escape from. A lot of what IT shops are trying to do today, is undo the pigging messes of information and applications that were created when individual business groups worked by themselves to "innovate" in the client-server era of the 1990s. If what some pundits are talking about here is really mashups, then they will never gain a foothold in the IT portfolio of any right-thinking enterprise.
Dion Hinchcliffe himself hints that he recognises the challenge here by burying this point towards the end of his
post:
There will be a mashup information ecosystem crisis. Whether it's the explosion of uncontrollable dependencies, vicious dependency cycles, scalability issues, privacy problems or some other side-effect of high levels of somewhat ad-hoc integration, mark my words there will be significant growing pains. Of course, we'll learn our lessons and there are ways of dealing with all the problems that will come up.
Yes - but in dealing with these challenges, we'll end up with something that looks a lot more like today's architected integration than today's web 2.0 mashup.
Come on, tell me if you think I'm wrong!
