There was article in the recent IBM Systems Journal, Changing the corporate IT development model: Tapping the power of grassroots computing, that discusses how the presence of mashups can transform application development within the enterprise. The article starts with a discussion thread that sounds very similar to what I heard from René Bonvanie, the SVP of marketing at Serena Software, provider of an enterprise mashup suite.

IT “budget realities have limited corporate-sponsored projects to those with the highest impact, leaving many needs unfilled…Long development cycles often result in applications that are unable to support evolved business needs. End-user efforts to address these gaps outside of the realm of corporate IT have been viewed, at best, with ambivalence.” I like the understatement of the last sentence. It goes on.

“The recent rise of Web-based ad hoc computing among both professional programmers and business professionals brings…a software-development approach that diverges from traditional IT methods: Teams or individuals who best understand their business problem rapidly create informal solutions to solve it. Not burdened by the overhead and formality of traditional IT methods, these casual developers focus on fast, good-enough results that can be refined later, if needed.”

“This new breed of applications, often developed by nonprofessional programmers in an iterative and collaborative way, shortens the traditional development process of edit, compile, test, and run. Situational applications are seldom developed from scratch; rather, they are assembled from existing building blocks.” The IBM article refers to these as situational applications and contrast them with the more traditional IT applications where “concerns with reliability and availability of corporate systems, data privacy, and security and…decreasing budgets.” They can address business needs that that IT cannot afford to tackle. The article talks about how the role of IT will change from solution provider to solution enabler facilitating the long tail of niche enterprise applications. .

The article documents some if IBM’s own experience with situational applications, providing nice case study material. First they found that the practice was wide spread within the enterprise with over 50 percent of IT people and 12% of business people have developed such applications outside the formal IT process. They also did some research outside IBM.

To support mashups IBM established the Situational Application Environment and put up a web site as a central clearinghouse for developers, as well as a catalog of applications. They also offered hosting for these applications. This supportive approach is covered in more detail in another IBM article I recently posted on, A model for CIO-led innovation. A number of examples of situational applications are offered. There are three types of tools: frameworks, ad hoc tools, and mashup makers such as QEDWiki. There is some nice detail here. An IBM study of CEOs found that companies with better IT-business integration delivered better financial results, to no surprise. Mashups, or situational applications, are a powerful way to support this integration. Thanks again to Tomoaki Sawada for pointing to this work.