White Paper - Enterprise Mashups in Government

WHITE PAPER
THE GAME CHANGING ROLE OF
ENTERPRISE MASHUPS IN GOVERNMENT
NOVEMBER 2009

IAN TOMLIN

www.encanvas.com

WHITE PAPER | The game changing role of
Enterprise Mashups in Government

Contents

Overview .............................................................................................................3

Challenging times for IT in Government ........................................................3

Government IT cost reduction strategies .......................................................4

Government IT growth innovation drivers .....................................................5

Silos - the business problem that spawned mashups ..................................6

Curiosity and the corporals ..............................................................................7

The long-tail of applications demand.............................................................8

Situational applications.....................................................................................9

Enter the ‘mashup’.............................................................................................9

More of a genre that a single technology................................................... 11

Contributing technologies to the mashup world ....................................... 12

Government use cases for enterprise mashups ......................................... 13

Encanvas – an example of how enterprise mashups work........................ 19

Lessons learned............................................................................................... 21

Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 22

Contact details ................................................................................................ 23

© 2009 Encanvas Inc. 2


Overview

Government departments and regional authorities around the world
are under pressure to achieve the improbable; of delivering
improvements in the quality of services to citizens while finding
sizeable cashable efficiency savings. The IT function is in the front-
line of achieving both of these desired outcomes. With advances in
enterprise mashups, new opportunities exist in Government IT today
for dramatic cost reductions and growth innovation fuelled by online
data capture, social networking, collaboration, process optimisation,
mobility and the code free design of composite applications that
federate data from across the enterprise.

Challenging times for IT in Government

Government administration covers many different discipline areas and
inevitably this brings complexity to IT systems. District and regional bodies will
It’s not uncommon for typically have more than 16 separate departmental functions with each
governmental organisations function commonly requiring its own portfolio of applications to support
to operate more than 100 operations. It’s not uncommon for governmental organisations to have more
different software vendor
than 100 different software vendor relationships. Even then, departments will
relationships...
demand a collection of home-made systems be developed to fill gaps where
shrink-wrapped solutions are oversized, don’t fit or underperform. But the
pressures on applications delivery don’t stop there; a general drive towards
open ‘e-Government’, cross agency working and the formation of
demographic or function-specific shared service centres has created new
pressures for IT teams to provide applications to harvest data across
departments and beyond their firewalls.



Leaders of many government departments and regional government
authorities have come to realize that it’s simply not affordable to build, procure
or manage the broad complexity of IT systems needed to support all of
mechanics of Government. This has led to an increase in outsourcing with
technology centric outsourcing partners who now contribute systems and
methods as part of their armoury of services. Unfortunately, outsourcing of IT
systems and processes has caused many organisations to fragment still further
to a point that it’s become difficult for senior managers to drive continuous
improvement because they no longer own IT systems or human resources that
service their business processes.

Systems virtualisation, After a decade of IT investments, and now with tighter budgets, many
harmonisation and governmental IT leaders are faced with the challenge of having to squeeze still
integration continue to be
more from systems investments they’ve already made. Systems virtualisation,
the key watch words for
Government IT in 2010. And harmonisation and integration continue to be the key watch words for 2010.
yet there is an undercurrent And yet there’s an undercurrent of pressure from political leaders for IT to do
of pressure from political more to show accountability of spending to citizens and somehow address the
leaders for IT to do more to gap that exists between organisational transformational needs and IT’s
show accountability to capability to deliver. And spending on IT is not favored by citizens. Whilst they
citizens on budget spending
want to enjoy the benefits of more streamlined online processes, better
and to somehow address the
gap that exists between customer service and lower taxes, they would much rather see money going
organisational into jobs, school books, dinner ladies and ‘front-line services’. New pressures
transformational needs and for cashable efficiency come at a time when many government IT leaders are
IT’s capability to deliver. experiencing staff skills shortages and spiralling costs for expert developers;
particularly those with good communications skills and an ability to manage
business transformation projects.

Government IT cost reduction strategies

Various cost reduction strategies are being adopted by government IT leaders
to achieve budgetary savings whilst improving the quality of IT services to
citizens and information consumers. These include:

1. Reducing the number of IT FTEs
IT leaders are experimenting with agile tools to develop business applications
as they need them without requiring large numbers of IT specialists or a
complex portfolio of development tools.

2. Displacing departmental and function specific software applications
IT teams are seeking to progressively displace and harmonise IT systems to
create integrated and affordable, enterprise information system. Business
Process Management (BPM) software technologies and composite applications
are key to this process owing to their ability to form workflows that cascade
across departmental boundaries resulting in productivity and data capture
benefits as well as greater transparency.



3. Giving citizens, staff and partners the ability to serve themselves
A substantial amount of data entry, re-keying and re-purposing of content still
occurs in governmental organisations. By automating the capture of data
online, or by entering data at an early stage in an information flow, substantial
costs can be removed.

4. Outsourcing and cross-sourcing
Organisational leaders are keen to see the supply and operation of IT systems
enveloped into business process outsourcing contracts to remove the IT
overheads on their own operations. In addition, government agencies are
keen to balance their peaks and troughs of demand for IT skills by calling on
the resources of IT specialist contracting agencies (an approach sometimes
called ‘cross-sourcing’) able to provide IT competencies at a moment’s notice;
often serving demand through overseas outsourcing centres.

5. Adopting alternative strategies for sourcing software applications
Governments are pressing for alternative procurement strategies to serve
software application demands. For example, the UK Government expects that a
significant part of the £35bn of efficiencies required from the public sector in
the next few years will come from the back office and the rationalisation of IT
made possible by the adoption of more appropriate software technologies.
There is perhaps good reason why central government believes more can be
done to cut software costs given the UK government spends in excess of £410
million on software each year (source IT Trends 2008/09).

Government IT growth innovation drivers

Against a backdrop of shrinking budgets, IT leaders are challenged to invest
more time in innovation growth initiatives driven by:

1. Citizen inclusion and satisfaction supported by accountability and
transparency
With a pressure on government finance, how money is spent has become
more of a political issue. This pressure is driving demand across government
for more accountability for spending and greater transparency of processes.

2. Information consumerism and the always online society
A focus towards e-Government continues as governments seek to strengthen
participation and citizen confidence in democratic decision-making. There is an
expectation that governments will improve tools for effective public debate
and participation in democratic decision-making which in today’s world means
online collaboration and engagement.

3. Green IT
Governments around the world are stepping up to the challenge to meeting
strict green performance targets aiming to reduce overall emissions to at least
20% below 1990 levels by 2020. IT is seen to play a crucial role in enabling



remote working (to reduce commuter impact), cut paper consumption, reduce
power usage (by virtualisation) and contribute to the improvement of business
processes.

4. Compliance
Compliance continues to be a driver for organisational change that places a
heavy burden on IT resources. Transparency of accounting and reporting
practices, more robust data protection and security - these are just some of the
major compliance areas that government departments and agencies are
having to content with.

5. Shared Services
Partly driven by a desire to reduce the number of governance tiers and also by
a necessity to cut costs, the wheels of government are turning to shared
service centres to manage common core functions. This can mean a sudden
and dramatic need for harmonisation across systems and transformation of
processes to support consolidation of functions to a single geographic
location. This is evidenced by the rampant growth of IT service revenue from
shared services projects from a mere $2.9 billion in 2007 to an anticipated $9.3
billion in 2012.

While these strategies are being implemented, government IT leaders continue
to tackle the bigger burden on IT operational excellence – the continued
existence of data silos.

Silos - the business problem that spawned mashups

For decades, management thinking has been driven by a vision of operational
For decades, management
thinking has been driven by a
excellence focused towards the mechanization of processes. Departmental
vision of operational managers have driven through innovations in their operational disciplines, and
excellence focused towards IT systems have formed around them, but in doing so Chinese walls have built
mechanization of processes. between silos that hinder cooperation, knowledge sharing and corporate
thinking. Following the law of unintended consequences, over time,
organisations inadvertently encourage departments to ‘silo’ by installing
incentives that promote achievement of department outcomes over
organisational goals. They let departments form their own management
structures, information technology systems and operating procedures.

Dr. Eli Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints is well known to organisational
consultants. It states that the core constraint of virtually every organisation is
that organisations are structured, measured and managed in parts, rather
than as a whole. This behavior results in lower-than-expected performance
with constraints; constantly shifting from one place to another and chronic
conflicts between people representing different parts of the organisation.

The ‘chicken and egg’ consequence of operational silo cultures is that
corporate information assets become hidden within the fragmented systems of
departments making content difficult, if not impossible, to harvest. IT systems
grow organically around departmental (silo) needs.



A survey of 163 companies that had implemented enterprise resource
planning systems conducted by Accenture in the early 2000’s found that the
mean number of instances (separate and distinct implementations of the
same software across regions or business units) was eight, with 32% having
implemented from six to more than 20 distinct instances.

For workers engaged in day-to-day activities that rely only on data from within
their silo of operation, this phenomenon isn’t a problem, but for people whose
roles charge them with solving problems, sourcing new ideas and harvesting
insights to deepen relationships with citizens and partners, such a fragmented
information architecture creates sub-optimal processes and performance.

Curiosity and the corporals

Governmental organisations that have spent years championing the
management principle that ‘operational excellence equals effective process
mechanization’ have seen their middle-managers - the corporals of the
enterprise – squeezed out. These curious thinkers (who at one timed would
have questioned the effectiveness of processes and might even have served
Demands for leadership skills unusual customer enquiries and requests by applying on-the-spot decision
‘at all levels of the enterprise’ making) have been discarded; replaced by telephone call scripts and document
are at their peak.
workflows.

Organisational leaders are coming to recognise that their corporals play an
important role in honing procedures. Furthermore, they perform an essential
...strategies to return agility role in questioning why business processes exist as they do in the first place.
to the enterprise are asking
new questions of the efficacy
Strategies to return agility to the enterprise in the form of curious middle-
of IT systems to support
managers are being hampered by a shrinking talent pool. In consequence,
middle-managers.
leaders are asking new questions of the efficacy of IT systems needed to
support this important minority of workers.

Middle managers spend more than a quarter of their time searching for
information necessary to their jobs, and when they do find it, it is often
wrong. Source: AIMS sponsored survey, January 2007.



The long-tail of applications demand
It is this important minority of
‘corporals in the enterprise’
who today are seen to carry It is this important minority of ‘corporals in the enterprise’ who today are seen
the torch of innovation now to carry the torch of innovation now demanded by organisations to achieve
demanded by organisations competitive advantage. In stark contrast with the majority of information
workers operating in silos and happily being served by a small number of
applications, this community of ‘get things done’ people feels underwhelmed
by the ability of IT systems to meet their constantly changing demands for new
applications. Their seemingly endless requests for software applications to
serve the new business situations they encounter are today being described as
the ‘long-tail of demand for software applications’.

The long-tail of applications; a driver for ‘situational applications’

It necessitates a different approach to first harvesting data and secondly,
The long-tail of demand for creating applications to use it better – often in ways that were never envisaged
applications requires a when it was first collected. The pace of change towards cross-sector
different approach to partnerships and shared services in the Government sector particularly is
harvesting data and creating
placing more pressure on key workers across the enterprise to find creative
applications to use it better.
new solutions to emerging situations. With so much content available via the
Web, workers understandably expect to be able to harvest data held by their
own enterprise that can help them to serve their role objectives. Yet resource
constrained IT leaders find bourgeoning demands for compliance, security,
system upgrades, platform support, customer support and administration
consume their budget well before the opportunity for innovation can be
considered. This conflict has driven the software industry to supply better ways
of delivering the volume and variety of applications that workers are now
demanding.



Situational applications

Enterprise mashups are a relatively new concept in corporate computing.
They’ve been around since the turn of the century but the application of the
IBM’s Situational Application technology differs so greatly from conventional models of computing that it’s
- The first attempt to taken the IT industry almost a decade to know what to call them. It was an IBM
describe an Enterprise paper titled “Changing the corporate IT development model: Tapping the
Mashup.
power of grassroots computing” (co-authored by Luba Cherbakov, Andy
Bravery, Brian D. Goodman, Aroop Pandya and John Baggett) published in the
IBM SYSTEMS JOURNAL in 2007 that first introduced the concept of situational
applications.

Their definition suggesting a new breed of application that:
 Is commonly developed by non professional programmers in an
iterative and collaborative way.
 That shortens the traditional development process of edit, compile,
test, and run.
The ‘mashup’ arrived, not as a
 Is seldom developed from scratch but rather is assembled from
robust technology with a
existing building blocks.
bold future in the world of
business, but as a play-thing  Is often used by a relatively small number of users (less than 50,
for the computing hobbyist according to a 2005 IBM-sponsored market research study on the
with some creative time to growing popularity of such applications).
kill.
IBM’s take on the impact of such applications was that developers could
expect to improve productivity and functionality from their situational
applications while greatly shortening the time between the identification of a
need to using a productive application that fills it.

Enter the ‘mashup’

While in businesses around the globe situational applications were being
created in back-rooms using a blend of (some) purpose-built and (others)
home-made technology, in the early 2000’s, industry visibility of this mini-
revolution in enterprise computing was subterranean. Meanwhile, out in
consumer land, new tools like Yahoo! Pipes and Microsoft Popfly were
emerging that were much more visible and programming hobbyists were
finding – with just basic scripting skills - they could create some quite creative
new ways to re-use accessible information services like Googlemaps and RSS
feeds to exploit existing information assets. The ‘mashup’ had arrived, not as a
robust technology with a bold future in the world of business, but as a play-
thing for the computing hobbyist with some creative time to kill. Meanwhile,
the great and the good of the computing industry sat wistfully and
contemplated whether there was an enterprise computing context to these
new toys,



What is a mashup?
Mashup - A composite
application that consumes
A ‘mashup’ is composite application that consumes ready-made building block
ready-made building block components and information services to produce a new outcome.
components and information
services to produce a new There are three main elements of ‘mashing’:
outcome. 1. Harvesting the data from different sources (with data often held in
different formats such as a database table, RSS feed, XML, CSV,
document format etc.). Sometimes these are called specifically ‘data
mashups’.
2. Creating new applications that enable ‘information consumers’ (the
modern term for Users) to exploit the information services they want to
use and make sense of what they’re seeing.
3. Sharing and re-using authored mashup applications

Not all mashup applications products support all three elements described
above. Mashups software enables non technical authors to serve-themselves
with applications that consume information services from data stores within
the enterprise and reach out to additional sources beyond the enterprise. The
Geo-spatial intelligence has
net impact is to generate new perspectives of aging data. Geo-spatial
proven to be the single most
popular use of mashups. intelligence – i.e. the ability to bring a location perspective to data assets by
displaying data records as ‘pins’ on maps – has proven to be the single most
popular use of mashups. Products like Encanvas employ their own mapping
technologies to enable designers to create their own unique mapping
applications where both the maps and pins are customizable. It’s also common
for mashup applications to provide data visualization and dashboarding
features – like meters and charts – to enable users to analyze the applications
data they’ve mashed.

The simplest illustration of a mashup architecture



More of a genre that a single technology

Explore different mashup software products and it becomes abundantly clear
that the term ‘mashup’ is used to describe a genre of technology rather than a
specific architecture or set of processes. Some of the products intended for
business use like Kapow focus on the aggregation and formation of new
information services – making data and content more consumable – while
other products like JackBe look something more like middleware designed for
Gen-Y and presume users have scripting skills. Explore the topic still further
and one encounters applications that create an internal market-place for re-
usable mashups like IBM Mashup Centre.

The mashup life-cycle
Where Encanvas differs is in its ability to offer the security credentials and
scalability needed to meet enterprise computing requirements and support the
full lifecycle of mashing which requires some explanation. It goes something
like this:

1. New business situations demand fresh insight that requires the re-use of
existing knowledge - perhaps enriched with third party content to be
useful.

2. Mashup applications create new federated views of data from across and
beyond the corporate boundary.

3. Having created these new insights, the usefulness of the composed
mashup application may run its course but often, successive developments
of the software application may be needed to discharge the business
requirement.

4. While some of these applications will be consumed by enterprise systems
architectures (i.e. Re-drafted or re-designed using Enterprise Portal Suites
and Business Process Management toolsets) others will remain as
important cogs in the enterprise machine for years to come.

Encanvas enables mashups to become core enterprise applications without
having to re-build user interfaces and processes in what might previously have
been considered ‘more robust’ enterprise computing technology. While other
mashup products use third party components and can only go so far to meet
business needs, Encanvas supports complex functionality like maps and
business intelligence with its own building blocks called ‘Middle-Apps’ which
means that designers can address applications complexity without having to
step outside of the Encanvas platform.



Contributing technologies to the mashup world

A collection of innovations has made this step-change in computing possible
and we summarize some of the more influential contributors here.

XML
XML (Extensible Markup Language) enables data about data to be included in
“The Encanvas enterprise
mashup platform employs a file necessary for encoding content electronically. XML-based files enable
XML-based files to describe machine to machine transfer of information and also facilitate process step to
applications to deployment process step transfer. The Encanvas enterprise mashup platform uses XML-
servers”. based files to describe software applications to its deployment platform,
carrying a series of ‘blocks’ of code in a single container so they can be
interpreted, transformed and loaded to the ‘consuming’ web portal server.

Web portals have since their inception been constrained by the limits of HTML.
As any component of a web page changes, the entire page of data is refreshed
requiring large volumes of data to be republished. The consequence of this is
that web pages have traditionally been inferior in their user interfacing and
presentation of content when compared to desktop embedded applications.
But AJAX changes this. AJAX, which stands for ‘Asynchronous JavaScript plus
XML’, is a group of interrelated web development techniques that enables
components of a web page to be refreshed asynchronously without requiring
the entire page to be updated. This innovation has allowed design tools to
offer richer interfaces with higher refresh performance and much greater
uniformity across browsers.

Microsoft® operating systems
Microsoft® operating
The unparalleled influence of Microsoft Corporation® in the computer industry
systems touch 80% of
computer users around the has served to create a defacto standard platform for applications development
world. that touches the majority (over 80%) of users around the world. Innovations by
Microsoft® in Internet services and operating systems has put within reach for
software companies the ability to develop mashups that large communities of
users can instantly access securely.

Services oriented computing and data mashups
Services-Oriented Until the last decade it hasn’t been possible to acquire data from disparate
Architecture - removes the sources and ‘mash’ it together so it could be re-used for different reasons.
necessity to repeatedly build Instead of having to create custom connections (and many of them) to core
custom data connections to data repositories, a services-oriented architecture describes an approach where
core back-office systems
web services are created to uniformly take data from one system and post it in
a way that it can be consumed by applications created using point-and-click
‘mashup’ design tools. The market for SOA software and services is expected
to reach $17.7 billion by 2011. Market growth comes because SOA enables the
flexible IT architecture needed by organisations to respond to information
consumerism.



Mobile communications
According to the UN, there are over 4 billion mobile subscriptions; on average
60 mobile phone subscriptions to every 100 people in the world. The rise and
The mobile phone has
rise of mobile technologies is giving more people around the world access to
become the world’s most
successful computing always on Internet. The mobile phone has become the world’s most successful
platform.... computing platform and promises to continue to have a major role in the
future. Access to the Internet brings with it the potential for millions of people
to become part of digital social networks and become the consumers of
applications created using mashup software that doesn’t require any client-
side installation.

Social networking
150 million people around the world are now actively using Facebook and
almost half of them are on the site every day: serving 300 million unique
experiences with people spending 8 billion minutes a day socializing online
and sharing over 2 billion pieces of content. Social networking has moved on
from being a popular pastime and is now seen as a vehicle to grow social
capital, expose personal opportunities for advancement, increase the
usefulness of collaboration and drive business results. Social networking is no
longer just social. Business organisations are exploring how social networks
can realize the potential of people, reach out to new prospects and deepen
relationship ties with customers and suppliers. It is the Social Operating System
that supports these activities that is progressively driving demand for massively
scaling portal architectures.

Government use cases for enterprise mashups

The broad role of Enterprise mashup software is to respond to ‘new situations’
– the long-tail of demand for software applications – and to meet the demand
of curious middle-managers who want to serve themselves with new ways to
use and consume information. Whilst the technology has relevance to most
industries, the information-centricity of Government IT makes mashups
particularly relevant to the sector. Some of the key areas of use are described
here.

Data capture and forms
Government departments and agencies receive thousands of applications and
citizens documents on paper, but with online forms, data is entered directly
into databases. The impact on online forms filling can be dramatic as
organisations move from pure paper to pure electronic process, freeing
agents' time.



Mapping mashups
Enterprise mashups make Producing enterprise mashups that capture, analyze and present data in its
geo-spatial intelligence geo-spatial context can benefit applications used for coordinating community
accessible to the entire engagement, service management and regional development. Being able to
enterprise.
visualize data on maps makes it much easier for planners and strategists to
appreciate location-based qualities that remain hidden in large data-sets
presented in spreadsheets and tables. Mashups make geo-spatial intelligence
accessible to the entire enterprise without having to employ dedicated
personnel to create and manage spatial data assets. Examples of map mashups
include location-based customer service enquiry management, routes to
school planning, school catchment area arbitration, traffic and streetworks
management, assets management, voting analysis and political representative
identification (when citizens want to be advised on who their representatives
are).

Inter-government agency collaboration
Enterprise mashups enable government departments to extend processes and
people networks securely beyond their firewalls to aid inter-agency
collaboration without fear of data breaches.

Communications and public relations mashups
PR and communications departments can use mashups to bring together data
sets from across the enterprise – and source additional data from the Web – to
evidence proof points and provide richer insights into the basis of decisions.



Internal marketing and communications
For management teams, communicating progress on improvement
programmes is vital to keep staff enthused and engaged, but without business
social networking tools this has proved difficult. Mashups provide the ideal
platform for creating engaging internal bulletin boards, voting systems and
news messaging.

Mobile mashups
Accessibility to the Internet provided by cell phones presents new
opportunities for client self-service applications and remote access to portal
sites. Enterprise mashups are well suited to the mobile market because they
satisfy the common requirement of mobile applications to source content from
disparate systems and populate new data tables without demanding new
‘specialist’ software purely for the creation and management of mobile
applications that creates a new silo in enterprise architecture. For citizens who
do not own a computer or have access to broadband, the mobile phone
becomes a powerful portal to government services on the Web.

Governments around the world are experimenting with the role of mobile
phone applications for citizen engagement. Mashup applications examples
include solutions for simplified payment processing, online voting, gathering
opinions and information services such as travel information and weather
Mobile phone mashup
warnings. Mobile phone mashup applications are also proving effective in
applications are proving
making processes more efficient by bringing location-based data capture and
effective in making processes
more efficient. point-of-need access to core systems data. Related mashup applications
include location-based data capture (surveys, onsite housing maintenance,
smart metering), and sometimes include geo-data and photographic records
(graffiti management, congestion and incident reporting).



Really adaptive business intelligence
Enterprise mashups introduce Whilst traditional enterprise business intelligence tools have proved expensive
a new dynamic to business
to buy and difficult to change without IT skills, enterprise mashups are easy to
intelligence in Government.
setup and deploy, responding to new situations as they arise. Through their
ability to acquire data from departmental silos and the Web they provide wider
access to insights. Examples include solutions for partnership performance
management, shared service centre performance reporting and citizen insights
analysis.

Citizen self-service mashups
It’s expected in the near future that Governments will enable citizens to serve-
themselves with tools to mashup the information services they’re interested in.
Political representatives and advocates can also be expected to mashup
Government sourced information services to provide more tailored and
relevant content for citizen panels and interest groups. Already, there are
moves in the United States to make more content available online (see
Data.gov).

Emergency event and crisis management
In situations where an instant view of a new situation is required such as
pandemics, homeland defence or release of hazardous chemicals – mashups
deliver instant insights and warnings to citizens across a region – particularly
when they include live communications tools like Encanvas Squork and Google
Wave.



Information bridging (internal)
Many mashup applications
Mashup applications can bring value by re-using content held within data silos
re-use content held within
data silos across the
across the enterprise enabling managers and leaders to access the insights
enterprise. they need to make better resource management and planning decisions.
Examples might include news ways of analyzing and interpreting regional
economic metrics (such as new businesses started, businesses closing) by
comparing regional statistics with the national picture.

Examples of information bridging mashups in Government

Flexible
Working

Performance Regional
Management Planning

Citizen
Risk Government
Engagement &
Management Mashups
Voting

Traffic
Online Forms
Information
and CRM
Management
Schools
Planning &
Routes to
School

Information bridging - Information bridging (external)
Some of the most useful Some of the most valuable insights come through comparison of data sourced
insights come through from third party providers. For example, data sourced from weather data
comparison of data sourced organisations like the Met Office can be used to determine impact of traffic
from third party providers
flows at particular times in the calendar.

Building and supporting communities
Mashups serve a major role in creating operating environments that nurture
and support social relationship development within and beyond the enterprise.



The diagram below illustrates some of the more common use case areas:

The collaborative landscape in the Government sector is constantly changing

Employee
Portals Mobility and
point of use
data capture
Citizen Inclusion Citizens
and Democratic
Government
Engagement
Public Website
and Social
E-Government Other Networking
self-service agencies

Shared Service Portals Special Interest
Portals ‘Every Child
Benchmarking Portals Matters’

Partnership Portals Insights

Employee Portals
Building collaboration and collective intelligence across the enterprise

Citizen inclusion and democratic engagement
Better ways of engaging with citizens

E-Government
Making more governmental services available online

Shared Service Portals
Embedding shared service centre performance into operational management

Benchmarking portals
Enabling organisations and departments to assess their effectiveness by comparing
performance data with peers

Partnership Portals
Extending networks and processes beyond firewalls to support partnership working

Mobility and point-of-use data capture
Supporting mobility applications for point-of-use interaction with core systems

Public Website and Social Networking
Engineering rich internet applications for public accessibility to information and
social networks

Special Interest Portals ‘Every Child Matters’
Responding to joined-up government collaborative projects



Encanvas – an example of how enterprise mashups work

Encanvas is one of the most sophisticated enterprise mashup platforms
available today and serves as an example of how mashups work in a business
context. The system uses a three step process to publish mashups:

Step 1. An XML-based integrated application describer file is created.

Encanvas Create design studio is the desktop point-and-click application used
to create ‘canvases’ (Encanvas’s XML-based describer file format). The canvas is
authored using four closely coupled design layers. The first layer is the Design
layer where the application UI is created using point-and-click tools and pre-
built application components (called design elements). Then logic links are
formed between onscreen components using drag-and-drop functionality of
the Linking layer. Data is gathered from existing sources or a new data source
is created using the Data Sources layer. Finally the Properties layer is used to
simplify the creation of meta-information about the canvas – who designed it,
what version, help notes etc.

Illustration of Encanvas Create design studio

Data mashups
An essential function of mashups is to humanize IT and make it possible for
non technical people to author applications. Perhaps the most complex aspect
of IT for most people is how to design and operate databases. Whilst mashups
don’t remove the need for IT knowledge, they do significantly reduce demands
placed on skills levels. For example with Encanvas, multiple sources of data can be
bound together using simple drag-and-drop tools. New data structures are created by
people with a lower level of computing competency. Gathering data is made easy by
upload and flow automation tools that create connections to offline systems using
scheduled events and data transformations.


Illustration of data mashup environment

Step 2. Applications are deployed

Encanvas Web Server Manager™ is the publishing component that takes the
integrated applications describer file (‘canvas’) and orchestrates its publication
to the Internet service platform; which in the case of Encanvas in Microsoft®
IIS.

Encanvas Web Server Manager™ orchestrates the publishing of applications

The publishing environment removes the complexity of publishing applications
to web portal spaces. It enables administrators to take complete ‘remote’
control over their cloud deployment environment without having to use a
combination of administrative tools. Every aspect of site configuration (i.e. User
identity and access control, integration with data sources, site presentation,
settings, authentication, user groups, languages and log file management) is
managed from a single administrative dashboard that doesn’t require any
coding or scripting knowledge.



Deploying to the cloud
Encanvas Web Server Manager may be configured to publish the web portal
sites it creates to dedicated customer spaces on cloud computing platforms
such as Microsoft® Azure. In such cases the process of deploying applications
is fully automated.

Step 3. Operation
Operation of deployed applications is placed more in the hands of users and
user groups through their Social Operating Systems. Emerging Social
Operating Systems enable users to add their own information services and
applications to secure workspaces. It is in these virtual workspace
environments that many of the applications are consumed. Applications
developed using Encanvas Secure&Live™ are maintained using Web Server
Manager. No further software tools are required.

Simple cloud publishing process for software applications

Design applications Deploy to cloud
using point-and- using integrated Operate remotely
click tools with configuration from the desktop
mashup capabilities dashboard

1 2 3

Lessons learned

From its track record of major blue-chip installations of Enterprise Mashups,
Encanvas identifies the following key learning lessons:

Fail to plan, plan to fail
Just because it’s iterative doesn’t mean you can do away with planning and
basic project management principles.

Garbage in, garbage out
Whilst much can be done to improve and enrich data with enterprise mashups,
it’s often the case that organisations are blissfully unaware of the poor quality
of their data and it only takes a simple data mashup to uncover years of
neglect in data quality management.

Internal politics can kill mashup value-add
Whilst enterprise mashups overcome many of the technology obstacles to
creating composite federated applications, departmental politics can soon
scupper projects. Small mindedness over ‘who owns the data’ can immediately
determine the viability of projects.



Achieving quick-wins
Seek out quick-win opportunities that bring rapid value back to stakeholders. If
it’s a big project, compartmentalize and identify deliverables that you can roll
out to meet quick-win expectations.

Selecting a mashup platform that can see the game through to the end
Many mashup platforms use third party technologies (such as Googlemaps)
and this often means that mashup software vendors are unable to make
changes necessary to deliver end-game solutions. This can lead to a reversal of
development strategy half way through a project when designers realize their
mashup platform is unable to fully meet the business need.

Conclusion

In search of deep cashable efficiency savings and agile IT, Enterprise Mashups
are set to have a major role in the front-line of new innovations and are likely
to transform the effectiveness of the organisations that adopt them.

Leveraging the opportunities made possible by Enterprise Mashups requires a
fundamental rethink of enterprise information management strategy, where a
services oriented approach is the first step on a new journey.

While it’s easy to see Enterprise Mashups as the latest in a long line of IT silver-
bullets, successful deployments in the Government sector show that the start-
point for new strategies is to evaluate the quality of existing data assets and
give consideration to the human sides of enterprise behavior and the critical
roles that ‘corporals and communities’ have to play in delivering organisational
agility.



Contact details

About the Author

Previously holding a series of Sales and Marketing Management and Directorship
positions in the European IT industry, in 2002 Ian Tomlin co-founded the
International Management Consultancy NDMC Ltd whose portfolio of clients
includes some of the world’s largest public and private sector organizations. With
Nick Lawrie he co-authored ‘Agilization’, a guide to regenerating competitiveness
for Western World companies. Ian Tomlin has authored several other business
books and hundreds of articles on business strategy, IT and organizational design
including ‘Cloud Coffee House’, a guide to the impact of cloud social networking
on business and ‘Social Operating Systems’, an exploration into the next
generation of enterprise computing platform.

About Encanvas

Encanvas® software makes the workplace work better. We bring added value to
the Microsoft® enterprise platform by creating the technologies organizations
need to spend less and receive more from their software investments. We’ve
created the world’s first Integrated Computer-Aided-Applications-Design (CAAD)
Software Platform. Our Secure&Live™ platform enables the near-real-time design,
deployment and operation of applications without coding in workshop
environments all made possible by a single tightly coupled architecture. It
facilitates the massive scaling of portal architectures; so users can communicate,
share information and their applications in real-time while operating in ‘secure
spaces’ that protect systems, data, identity and intellectual property.

Encanvas Inc.
2710 Thomas Avenue, Cheyenne, Wyoming 82001 USA.
(Americas) +1 201 777 3398
(Europe) +44 1865 596151
www.encanvas.com

All information of whatever kind and which is contained in this documentation shall be called for the purposes
of this project ‘Confidential Information’ and remains the property of Encanvas Inc. All trademarks and trade
names used within this document are acknowledged as belonging to their respective owners.


White Paper - Enterprise Mashups in Government

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