Anyone surfing around ProgrammableWeb.com or ThomasHowe.com knows that mashup technologies will get integrated into the business process in a huge way before this decade ends.
Why will this happen?
Mashups make businesses faster.
Mashups make businesses more efficient.
Mashups make customers happier.
Now, of course, we feel that our particular slice of the mashup world-Real Time Communications technologies- will help to leverage the broad range of Web 2.0 technologies across multiple APIs.
Simply, this is because all businesses are using telephony now. They are comfortable with it and so “customizing” their communications infrastructure doesn’t stretch the corporate culture in a huge way. In fact, telephones provide the only consistent, reliable user interface within and across Enterprises worldwide.
The obstacles that need to be overcome so the Mashup evolution can become a true revolution have little to do with the technologies. The revolution will be won when more business and organizational leaders start to have conversations about the ideas generated by Andrew McAfee of Harvard Business School and Erik Brynjolfsson of the MIT Sloan School. They are a couple of the thinkers behind the Enterprise 2.0 discussion.
Here is a working definition from Professor McAfee’s blog.
Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.
- Social software enables people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form online communities. (Wikipedia’s definition).
- Platforms are digital environments in which contributions and interactions are globally visible and persistent over time.
- Emergent means that the software is freeform, and that it contains mechanisms to let the patterns and structure inherent in people’s interactions become visible over time.
- Freeform means that the software is most or all of the following:
Optional
Free of up-front workflow
Egalitarian, or indifferent to formal organizational identities
Accepting of many types of data
My only concern with this working definition is the term social software is starting to get co-opted by social networking applications. If voice, text, presence technology isn’t social software then nothing is.
To all the mashup makers and technologists, the rapid pace of change shows that we know how to walk the walk. However, we all need to spend some time getting better at talking the talk.