Lauren Cooney at IBM provided some useful notes from the Mashup Camp in a comment to my post, Is IT looking over its shoulder at Web 2.0? These ideas have been presented before on this blog, (e.g., the post she commented on but also elsewhere by others) but it is nice to see another confirmation. Go to her post, How Web 2.0 is shifting the programming model, for more details. Here are the highlights.

With Web 2.0, the programming model is shifting towards the assembly of applications more than the development of applications and a shift in the role of development from the actual app developers to IT department developers and possibly to business analysts.

There has to be a cultural shift within the IT mindset to turn IT from an inhibitor to an enabler for how information is managed within the enterprise. IT departments also need to get educated on risk management.

Lauren concludes with this prediction:

“Right now I think that the dial is starting to turn here, but this process isn’t going to happen overnight. With mashup and Web 2.0 vendors like Google, IBM, Microsoft, and others out there, I am guessing that it’s going to be a “tipping point” sort of movement. The grassroots movement with users and information consumers has already started… and I think that we’re going to soon see a top down change with executives buying into this model and these changes as they start to see potential benefits.”

I agree with Lauren on large enterprises. With small enterprises that are just adding infrastructure, it might be hard for them to assemble a best of breed collection of enterprise 2.0 tools. I think there is a great market for low cost, and some times free, enterprise 2.0 tools in small businesses but the need for basic infrastructure may be a priority for their smaller IT budgets, and, more often, attention spans. Perhaps the software firms that recognize this and provide a platform or the ability to integrate with a common platform may come out ahead. For example, I have seen some small firm tools integrate with IBM Websphere Portal and Sharepoint (e.g. Sharepoint Adds Some Purer Play Partners). This is not to say that a pure play provider cannot survive on its own but the firm should have a strategy to compete with, or link up with, integrated tool sets or perhaps provide their own platform.