Blogging Serena TAG - 5: Oliver Young – How to be an IT Super Hero

The tag line for this session is “delivering business value with mashup technology.” I am blogging much of the Serena Tag 2008 conference. This is part five. Oliver Young is a Forrester analyst who recently went out on a limb and predicted a big market for mashups and enterprise 2.0.

Oliver defined web 2.0 and then went through the three types of mashups, presentation, data, and process as discussed in prior sessions. Oliver said, that from his prospective, Serena is the only player in the latter space. IT cost reduction will be a big driver of mashups. This will speak the language of the CIO. However, within most organizations, understanding of mashups is low. There is a role for evangelical work here.

Next, Oliver looked at the peril of mashups. Business users can get in over their heads. They can get stuck. Oliver says that Forrester recommends to start small with mashups for this reason. You can train a core team as you go forward if the effort is reasonable and build capability without get over stretched.

The next peril is the possibility that simple innocent well-intended mashups can become monster applications. What if the mashup becomes too wide spread but the creator or the data goes away? The third peril is overselling the benefits to set up unrealistic expectations.

A key success factor is setting expectations about skill requirements. You need to find data sources, clean up and transform data, and figure how it should be displayed. Most business users should focus on the last skill at first and let IT support the top two requirements.

There is also a need to create mashup-friendly data sources. This was an issue discussed in the last panel (Blogging Serena TAG - 4: Mega Mashup – Rene Bonvaine). Look for both internal and external data suppliers (e.g., Reuters, Hoovers, Lexis Nexis). StrikeIron and Xignite are aggregation sources to find data providers for particular needs.

People, objectives, strategy, technology are the four steps. Oliver acknowledged that this was a bit common to most IT efforts but companies still ignore them. They get caught up with the new tools. I could not agree more. I found this over and over again in my twenty five years of IT related consulting. You need to first define what business process are broken now. What do people need? Sometimes asking this questions of implementers of failed IT problems gets a blank look.

Then you need to push your mashup vision with the CIO with both technical and business arguments. In many cases, you can show how mashups can help get value out of SOA investments. Mashups can help bring innovation to the table at a lower cost. IT needs this in today’s economy.

Next, you need to establish a policy that defines how you will support mashups. Bring in governance as needed. Also, develop a “should this be a mashup” checklist. Finally, monitor your results. However, Oliver argued against the simple “saves time” ROI. You need to find real value that impacts the bottom line. I could not agree more and I am always surprised when someone still pushes the “saves time” ROI. This was a clear summary of implementation issues.