Bloomberg says mashups need governance as well as an easy development environment

Jason Bloomberg, a ZapThink analyst, is planning to hold a session at SOAWorld 2008, where he will discuss the need for mashup governance when developing Service-oriented business applications. (SOBAs) I won't be at his session, or even at the conference, but I read what looks like his abstract in the press.

Bloomberg's conclusion: mashups need governance, and here's why.

Way back in the day, when PCs first made their way into the business, we developed many and varried applications. These apps were complete one-offs and at some point they became too expensive for the business to maintain. The business dropped these apps right back in ITs lap. IT proceeded to toss many of them, replace others and rewrite still others. The apps didn't have legs for long-term usefulness. Their data sources were siloed, their interfaces inconsistent and their development environments primitive.

Now we have a new wave of business-built applications, or mashup-based SOBAs in Bloomberg's terms. If we don't want to repeat our past mistakes, we need to make sure this new crop of applications is architected for the enterprise. They will need to be loosely coupled to back-end systems, employ rich interfaces akin to those now common in the consumer world, and have a development environment that will make it easy for the original business mashers to maintain them as business requirements evolve.

To this Bloomberg adds,

"...Clearly, no business would risk allowing any of its employees to assemble and reassemble business processes willy, nilly, with no controls in place to ensure that the resulting SOBAs followed corporate policies."

The problem with this statement is that employees are assembling and reassembling SOBAs willy-nilly. The lack of controls to make sure these applications follow corporate policies is one of the very things that make fast innovation possible. The ungoverned free-for-all of mashup construction is part of the mashup DNA.

So mashers are mashing, not just in the wilds of the uncontrolled web, but also behind the firewall. We don't want to stop them, and we can't trust them to self-govern. Not because they are evil, lazy or stupid, but because they should be busy innovating, not fighting a version control system. Bloomberg seems to agree, and he goes on to say that when governance is put in place the mashup environment starts looking less like a Web 2.0 environment and more like a standard development environment.

Not necessarily. The trick is to integrate light-handed governance with a mashup construction environment that looks and feels like a MS Office application, or better yet, iTunes. Certainly not like Popfly or Eclipse. But we also want mashup-based SOBAs to have legs for the long term. So we need security. We need version control. We need change management. What we don't need is to discourage our would-be mashers by making governance obstructive. Governance should be a silent side-effect of building a mashup. A Side-effect ignored right up to the point where somebody accidentally honks up one of the production mashups.

Is this a mere dream?

Yes and no. There are some mashup construction tools on the market that incorporate version control. There are some that include security. There are some that include change management. Unfortunately, there are none yet that include all the old application development disciplines. So yes, it is a dream for the moment.

However, the fact that some mashup enablement vendors are already thinking about governance tells me that the tools will evolve, and likely very quickly. So maybe this isn't a dream after all. Maybe it's just a product roadmap issue. Unlike our first go-round with business-built applications, we have some experience with what does and doesn't work. This time around IT should be on hand to provide a safety net rather than a brick wall. This time things just might be different.

If we've learned from the past we will create an environment where business-built applications will remain with the mashers, to wax and wane and ebb and flow right along with the business.