Anthony J. BradleyI’m just returning from a few days of travel in the Washington DC area where I met with or presented to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), Social Security Administration (SSA), and Housing and Urban Development (HUD) on mashups, SOA, WOA, and cloud computing.
I also spent some quality time with the leadership team of mashup vendor JackBe. CEO, Louis Derechin and I were discussing the difference between BI and mashups. I was on the whiteboard drawing architectural diagrams (I’m very happy when I play with markers) while he used an analogy. I liked his analogy and in engaging with him on it I believe I improved it a bit (at least for my purposes). I told him I would steal it. Admittedly it is for lay people and not technologists. As with any analogy you can get technically critical but I really think this gets the point across.
Think of when you are driving a car. The BI\DW reporting is analogous to your dashboard. It is well engineered and provides significant value. It gives you a fairly static set of tools although some of the data may change frequently (speed for instance) while others change more slowly (gas) and some barely at all (oil pressure) but the mechanism is designed well for a constrained view of what is happening (in this analogy it is the vehicle’s performance).
Mashups are analogous to the windows and mirrors, less constrained and more panoramic. Source information comes from many places, numerous places that can’t be defined ahead of time, and the information is highly dynamic, contextual in nature, and tailored specifically to what you are doing at that very moment. There is so much unpredictable variety in the situation and the surrounding information that you can’t predefine and engineer the interface. You can only provide the core capabilities (windows and mirrors) a driver can use to assemble the views and react to the information.
One does not replace the other. You need both the dashboard and the windows/mirrors to effectively operate a vehicle.
As the discussion progressed in other directions I, at one point referred back to this automobile analogy on the difference between mashups and enterprise portals. At which time Louis reminded me that the analogy was about mashups vs. BI\DW, not enterprise portals. I had subconsciously extended the analogy where the enterprise portal was the dashboard and mashups again the windows and mirrors. This also seemed to hold well.
What do think of this smoke and mirrors, oops I meant windows and mirrors (…I’m just joking…), analogy for mashups? Do you think this will resonate with your non tech leaders who are asking, “What is different about mashups?”
Category: mashups Tags: dashboards, portals
4 responses so far ↓
1 jeremy March 20, 2009 at 4:10 pm
Yes.
2 Jeremy Burton March 26, 2009 at 4:50 pm
I’d take the analogy one step further. Mashups certainly allow you to quickly bring together like information so that you have more context for what you’re doing. So mirrors & windows on a car are a good start. But that’s a pretty simplistic “presentation” mashup. If my phone can connect to my car stereo via bluetooth that’s even better because the cool speakers on my car can then participate in the process of communication while i’m driving – a big value add. And the “mashup” was done through standard interfaces so there is no work to do. Even better, if my phone then sync’s its contacts with the car’s address book I’ve got a useful “data” mashup. If I could then plot the addresses on my car’s GPS map that would be killer because then I could just touch their name and the navigation system would direct me there. And I don;t need to take the car into the dealer to do any of this stuff – no professional mechanics required.
Mashups are so much more than another portal. Its the best of portals, BI, workflow and elements of data integration … but its 10x faster/easier than the way folks have done it for the last 10 years. You can’t do 100% of what has been in done in the past, but you can do 50% of it 1000% faster.
3 Anthony Bradley March 26, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Agreed. You can take it even further to make additional points. This proves the analogy further. BTW, everything you added is still a “presentation” mashup.
4 Luis Derechin March 28, 2009 at 8:31 pm
Jeremy,
Good follow-up. I like the direction that this analogy went… the important thing is that analogy works and is a much better way to explain the difference between BI and Mashups and Posratl and Mashups to non-techies.
Thanks for chiming in!!!
Luis