Understanding Mashups
Over the last few years there has been a lot of discussion around the new technology of Business Mashups—composite web applications that coordinate processes and bring data from different systems together. But what is the real business impact and opportunity that Mashups bring?
Instead of relying on manual means such as email to coordinate work, Business Mashups automate critical activities across teams and systems so that you can optimize your business.
The Problems Business Mashups Solve
With information growing at exponential rates, competitive pressures, and a challenging economy, organizations continually look for areas to reduce costs and increase productivity.
Whether it is getting a critical bug fixed and into production, or speeding the sales cycle to close deals faster, manual, siloed, and uncoordinated processes have several things in common that contribute to their inefficiency:
- Common business activities aren't automated. Work isn't passed efficiently between different people and systems.
- Management has little insight into the status of critical tasks for business, auditing or regulatory needs. Key information is stuck in workers' inboxes.
- These manual processes are not repeatable or traceable.
To meet these challenges, organizations have leveraged the tools currently at their disposal: email, spreadsheets, links to reports, collaboration technologies, etc. Unfortunately, these tools have a number of significant drawbacks. First, they are often manual and, as a result, error prone, not scalable and not repeatable. Second, they are a set of technologies that are cobbled together, rather than a specific tool designed to address a specific business need - and they must be built from scratch with every new opportunity. Third, solutions that meet these needs often require custom development and are very expensive (in terms of both software and implementation costs).
Business Mashups empower you to deploy your own composite applications that bring efficiency to your critical business activities by automating collaboration across people and systems.
