Companies need to deal with mashups

Do you remember when you were young and you mixed and matched the different “food zones” that your mom had carefully delimited in your plate?

You were looking for best tasting combination to satisfy your personal preferences. Right there and then, you were mashing up food so your meal would taste the way -you- like it.

Fast forward in 2008, mashups are based on the same food mixing logic only this time, data is being rearranged to fit personal preferences.

Web users “mashup their data” all the time, mainly on their desktop but also, more often now, online.

The rise of AJAX coding has jazzed things up quite a bit, within even the most mundane (static or lightly dynamic) web pages.

In a no-frills scenario, with just a few mouse clicks, a user can decide that a given “mashable start page” will include (1) local news, (2) the titles of the last 10 emails received, (3) a link to the top 20 pop radio hits and why not, (4) the local sports team’s interactive calendar — these snippets of information are called blocks and typically, they can be rearranged by the user for his own needs.

In clear, users are now more in control of which information they see and how it’s presented to them. This approach fits perfectly with the “web 2.0 thinking” but is that the kind of flexibility companies are looking for?

As usual, home computer users bring some of their computing habits to the office and wether they’re prepared for it or not, the enterprise IT has to deal with them. Mashups are simply the latest in a long list of emerging technologies to cross the “home-to-office” bridge.

Opposing views over innovation VS governance spawn heated debate over mashups because while rearranging data might make the worker happier and more efficient, the governance efforts might hit a wall trying to follow-up with “infinitely personalized” work environments and online tools.

By keeping in mind that a mashup is a web application that combines data or services from more than one source into a single integrated application, it’s easy to anticipate the rise of the user as the end of the line “programmer” of information in the way that best fits his needs so in this kind of “mashed future”, the governance people fight an uphill battle.

Governance should be careful not to stiffle innovation, including the emerging mashups, because old IT -and- antiquated work methods could hurt a company in more ways than one.

Once a user has tasted the sheer power of mashups, it’s likely going to be quite frustrating going back to rigid, user-unfriendly interfaces presenting all the wrong information within a marathon of different “screens” that just don’t foster any level of heightened productivity… and work satisfaction.

With the powerful drive from web services and SOAs (service-oriented architectures), governance proponents should probably bite the bullet now and embrace mashups instead of hurting innovation by enforcing rigid rules that nobody but them are likely to appreciate… and approve of.

Tags: mashups, data, information, gui, interfaces, content, web 2.0, governance