LiteBytes from Lustratus Research

Will mashups mash up your infrastucture?

One of the forecasts in the Lustratus predictions for 2008 Insight, available free of charge from the Lustratus web store, deals with the emergence and adoption of mashups. At this moment it is unlcear how fast mashups will be adopted, but Lustratus thinks that any serious adoption will place massive strain on enterprise infrastructures, causing the unwary to buckle and collapse.

Mashups seem great. The user is suddenly in a position to create his or her own page layout with all the business applications needed to carry out this user's activities. A great productivity boost, perhaps, but what are the impacts on the enterprise? Basically, as Lustratus points out, every desktop becomes an application. Instead of an IT department having to worry about 10 or 20 applications, all of a sudden there are 100s or even 1000s. Worse still, while traditional IT-controlled applications are usually controlled fairly rigorously with procedures, policies and management practices, the world of mashups could well be more akin to anarchy.

Fundamental to a productive mashup will be the need to drive the different business services required by the particular user, and therefore services will suddenly become tools used by hundreds in many different ways. All of this activity could create huge traffic increase as well as a generally uncoordinated style of operations, causing major difficulties for the infrastructure software trying to hold everything together.

Well, OK, maybe this is a little negative - but the point is, enterprise architects and management should start considering these issues now. Trying to sort this out when the genie is out of the bottle will be a lot more difficult.....

      Steve 

Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0: What's that?

A recent item on SearchSMB provided an excellent piece of sanity counter-balancing the hype around Web 2.0 and starting to bubble up around Enterprise 2.0.  A speaker at the IDC IT Forum and Expo in Boston asked his audience how many of their employers were using Web2.0 technologies:  The answer zero.  The writer points out that this is in stark contrast with IDC findings that around 45%  blogs, 43% RSS and 35% wikis (the core technology components of Web2.0  by most definitions).  Unfortunately, he goes on to claim that the divergence is because rogue users are experimenting without telling the IT managers – a conclusion which I find a little implausible.  It seems more likely that the 0% rate is probably too low but the other findings are much too high (reflecting the usual over-statement when asking people soft questions like ‘experimenting’ and ‘piloting’ or ‘planning’ as I have previously blogged about).   

Of course, there is real value in Enterprise 2.0 – taking the Web2.0 technologies and philosophy of user engagement and putting them into the work context.  As a starting point, I would mostly ignore blogs, and instead focus on wikis and RSS and of course AJAX-based mash-ups if you regard them as part of the web2.0 palette.  For those of you who have yet to get to grips with Web 2.0 concepts, look at the now famous and still excellent article by Tim O’Reilly here.  On the Enterprise 2.0 side, Don Hinchcliffe has a blog worth tracking.

Ronan