Monster Mashups

Posted on March 8th, 2010 Adam Honig Comments 0

Where are all the enterprise mashups?

The concept of the mashup—a composite application built from easy-to-integrate, reusable components—is simple: inside one application, you automatically show, compare or contrast information from somewhere else. Furthermore, you don’t have to provide parameters; the mashup automatically combines the information.

Some excellent examples involve Google Maps. For example, after the recent earthquake in Chile, mashups provided current information on road closures as well as open supermarkets. In the U.S., meanwhile, one mashup uses data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System to pintpoint road fatality black spots.

These are incredibly useful applications, but they’re also quite consumer focused. Which leads me to wonder: Where are the enterprise mashups? In 2008, Forrester Research predicted that the enterprise mashup market would reach $700 million by 2013. Ajax, Web Services and location-based services were all the rage. Experts predicted that mashups would free enterprise users especially from the tyranny of waiting weeks or months for IT to create the reports they needed—if indeed they did ever get created.

But is this user-driven state of enterprise information liberation still unfolding in 2010?

Who Wants Mashups?

In the CRM realm, on-premise Siebel CRM software, version 8.1, added an applet-based services, making it relatively easy to embed some service information into other applications. Salesforce.com also makes using these types of applets relatively easy. For example, you can access a contact’s LinkedIn information from Salesforce.com.

Perhaps the above is useful, but so far it doesn’t herald an information-access revolution.

Workplace Mashup Manifesto

What we really need are mashups with hardcore workplace upsides. For example, if I’m working in a service center and a client calls, I’d like to see all of the trouble tickets the client has open, and know if there are any outstanding issues, before I try to up-sell or cross-sell him.

From a professional standpoint, this is the information you need. And if it’s delivered via a mashup—meaning that on one page, I can manipulate and close out the trouble ticket, enter the client’s credit card to resolve the billing dispute or automatically dispatch a required part and provide an actual Fedex tracking number—so much the better.

Liberating Enterprise Data—Or Not

Technically speaking, however, creating enterprise mashups remains challenging. The sticking point is internal data. Combining your CRM application’s contact list with Google Maps to build better territories is one thing. But generating customer-facing epiphanies (or at least really great service)—for example, by mashing-up your CRM, ERP and financial systems and legacy back-end systems via Web-enabled SOA to manipulate data in any of those systems in real time—is relatively difficult, simply because the information most often remains locked in those various systems.

Financial Services Firm: We Don’t Need No Stinking Mashups

Furthermore, organizations that do make the effort to integrate and combine information from numerous systems in innovative ways often don’t need user-driven mashups; they just need the information. For example, Innoveer has been helping a large US financial services firm to extract operational data from numerous back-end systems, combine it with CRM information, and provide agents with a single Siebel CRM homepage—backed by Siebel Analytics—containing, at a glance, everything they need to know.

Front and center on the agent’s homepage is a report listing recently placed orders. This is vital information because the best way to ensure these orders turn into deals is by reaching out—the agent following up by phone, asking how they can help, and using their sales smarts to close the deal. Another report, to encourage better performance, analyzes the revenue each agent has generated, versus the number of client calls they make.

The end result: Agents see useful information, without glimpsing the underlying systems complexity that brought them the information. (That’s definitely not “need to know.”) Even better, they didn’t have to build it themselves.

Not A Quant at Heart?

Perhaps that’s the ongoing roadblock for mashups: It presumes that end users will want to mashup CRM, ERP and financial information themselves. For a small set of power users willing to get their hands dirty, this may be true. But for salespeople who excel at selling, or who can be encouraged to reach this state, the imperative isn’t to provide them with cutting-edge, self-service Web applets, but simply with the information they need: Who do I sell to, and where do I find them?

Easy access to essential information is the currency of any great sales organization. Until composite applications can provide that, and professionals have a compelling reason to use them, we won’t see many enterprise mashups.

Learn More

When it comes to CRM, less is more—and mashups are no exception.

Even without mashups, organizations have access to great techniques for getting the data they need. In particular, a service-oriented architecture (SOA) help organizations integrate their systems and consolidate information to better manage customer data and ensure a single, definitive source of information.