Mashups: An Approach to Overcoming the Business/IT Gap in Service-Oriented Architectures

Abstract

For quite a long time already, great importance has been attached to the concept of Service-Oriented Architectures for future IT-architectures. However, a major challenge in implementing this concept lies in the gap between the functional department and IT department. Mashups, an architecture also based on services, try to avoid this gap by letting the user himself integrate the services. The following article analyzes similarities and differences between both architecture approaches, and explains to what extent and in which cases Mashups could complement a Service-Oriented Architecture.

Service-oriented system evolution taxonomy and metrics derived from complex adaptive systems theory

“…In the abstraction phase service conceptualisation in form of high-level abstractions of business logic and re-usable processes will be carried out, in the analysis phase detailed service descriptions will be outlined along with business integration, EA and meta-data specifications, whereas in the design phase component and architecture logical and physical designs will be produced. Bitzer and Schumann (2009) interpret the development approach of SOA and the interplay between the Functional and IT department during this process. They emphasise appropriate interactions between both departments in order to overcome the Business/IT gap in modeling service-oriented information systems.…”

Social Information Systems - The End of Shadow Applications?

“…Situational applications are enterprise applications built on-the-fly by business units to solve a specific business problem (Markl, Altinel, Simmen and Singh, 2008), and can be considered a superset of shadow applications. Situational applications have attracted recent interest from enterprise mashup researchers (Hoyer and Fischer, 2008) who aim at allowing end users to integrate and combine services, data and other content (Bitzer and Schumann, 2009) to bridge the IT/business gap. Mashups can be interpreted as an evolution of service-oriented architectures (Watt, 2007), which expose business functionality as standard and composable services.…”

Enterprise Mashup Systems as Platform for Situational Applications

“…For instance, market research companies like Gartner (2008) and Forester (Young et al 2008) confirm a high economical significance of EM and forecast a growing relevance of this paradigm in the coming years. Furthermore, recent scientific work also emphasizes the importance of Mashup platforms as an extension of enterprise integration infrastructures and a supplement to service-oriented business architectures and classical business intelligence platforms (see, e.g., Bitzer and Schumann 2009;Gamble and Gamble 2008). However, the business impact of Mashup introduction has not yet been analyzed adequately since existing research mainly focuses on the underlying technical concepts and principles of Mashup systems (Maximilien et al 2008;Rosenberg et al 2009), i.e., the design stage Koschmider et al 2009) and implementation (Blake 2009;Yu et al 2008;Vancea et al 2008).…”