Meeting these security and governance requirements can't be done as an afterthought. You must be proactive and persistent. But remember: innovation and security/governance don't have to be mutually exclusive. In fact, the more secure your SOA (and the mashups built from it), the more freedom you can give users to make use of this dynamic technology.

Practical Examples of SOA-Driven Enterprise Mashups
SOA-driven mashups have broad application in the enterprise across most departments, functions, and vertical applications. Based on market research and experience we've identified a number of mashups that are universally applicable. While many of these may seem trivial, ask yourself if you have implemented them all:

•  Customer Service: Mashup your call center application with third-party package tracking.
It's the solution to the classic "let me check another place" scenario. Mash up your order management system with logistics information from UPS or FedEx; you can even add a map to visualize order status. This mashup can give call center reps immediate access to order status and package tracking instead of forcing them to alt-tab between different applications, lower call times, and raising customer satisfaction at the same time.

•  Product Management: Mash up your competitive position in the marketplace.
There's a vast wealth of publicly available information about your competition - key announcements, news, financial performance, partnering, and business development, even speeches and marketing campaigns. Imagine a mashup that captured this - one that included an RSS feed from Google News on key competitor search terms, and benchmarked pricing on key competitive products against your own. This competitive intelligence mashup would be tailored to your particular product or territory, whether you are a retailer, consumer products company, technology company, pharmaceutical company, or another similarly competitive firm.

•  Community Engagement: Mash up your product defect tracking with code management, time-tracking systems, and blog commentary.
Odds are you have a number of known issues with your products and need to assess the severity of the problem in the market quickly. While we're not talking about critical safety defects in an automobile, we are talking about a bug in a piece of software or consumer electronics product. Mash up your bug database with comments on blogs and user forums to determine whether you should proactively address the issue before it balloons into a P.R. nightmare.

•  Research: Mash up independent medical, scientific, financial, or legal law research with your own internal data.
Whether your business deals with research in the medical, scientific, financial, or law fields, connecting emerging research data from third parties with your own internal work can be crucial to decision making. Mashing research provides users with quick access and comparison to time-sensitive information, providing better access to relevant research and allowing for better internal research decisions and discoveries.

•  Decision Support: Mash up your product specifications, revenue planning, and product information with other products on the market.
Whether your product information exists in Excel spreadsheets or an ERP system, you can easily mash up that data with external competitive information for better tracking of results, more accurate competitive information, and an increased time-to-market for your product. You can share these results with other users and have ad hoc access.

•  Transportation: Mashups for pre- and post-event logistics analysis.
Logistics companies operate sophisticated predictive analysis teams to coordinate supply and demand for their services. They need to coordinate capacity based on manufacturing schedules, market conditions, and weather. When they get it wrong, they drive around the country with empty trucks, or are forced to lease capacity from other providers, at the cost of corporate profits and customer service. Mashups can't solve the predictive analysis challenge but they are a great way to do post-mortem analysis. Create a mashup that polls data from prediction systems and compares it with data from real-time logistics systems. Bringing this data together, analysts can review performance and adjust their assumptions, making their analysis more accurate.

•  Financial Services: Mashups for real-time enterprise-wide risk management.
Traditional risk modeling is a challenge since it provides an incomplete picture of true risk - there are just too many internal and external sources of data, and these systems are overly focused on capturing internal information. When key external data is missed, uncovered risk becomes a major issue. Mashups can't prevent the next sub-prime lending crisis but a risk management mashup can improve decision making by combining traditional risk scoring models and scores with external information such as economic and jobs data, supplemental payment histories not found on credit reports (such as rent payments), and research on companies and individuals. Most importantly, mashups put the power to configure risk management information into the risk manager's hands himself - they no longer have to wait for IT to build yet another complex application that is outdated as soon as it's completed.

•  Government & Defense: Mashups for dynamic adaptive intelligence gathering.
Situational awareness is critical in both the military and technology sectors, and mashups are a key tool to meet that need. Intelligence analysts want real-time dashboards of current situations to make the right decisions - but this information must be collected from many internal and external data sources, and presented in an easy-to-digest dashboard. There's no time for ETL, sophisticated data integration, or complex processing - analysts want to see the data fast and make their own inferences. This is a great description of what a mashup is all about, and why the Defense Intelligence Agency recently built a desktop-like intelligence asset dashboard using mashup technology.

•  E-Commerce: Mashups for real-time competitive intelligence.
Every e-commerce manager knows that the e-tailing word is hyper-competitive, with price changes taking minutes and consumers using sophisticated scanning tools to move to the lowest priced sites. E-merchandisers need a near-instant snapshot of critical data - site traffic and performance statistics, competitive price and product mix, online ad spending, and consumer preferences, just to name a few. And they need it long before monthly internal reports or quarterly syndicated data. Every company with an e-presence can create a simple CI mashup that takes a competitor's top 10 seller list in a particular category and compares it to their own. Mashups can put the power right into the hands of the front-line merchandiser to ask and answer his own questions, and adjust the marketing mix faster.

Gartner recently named Enterprise Mashups a "Top 10 Strategic Technology for 2008," noting that "by 2010, Web mashups will be the dominant model (80%) for the creation of composite enterprise applications." The time for mashups has come. And it's time every SOA architect included enterprise mashups as part of their SOA initiative.