The reason for much of the chatter about mashups and Service-Oriented Business Applications (SOBAs) arises from the fact that mashups, and Web 2.0 in general, are primarily social phenomena, while SOBAs, and SOA generally, are primarily business phenomena: the “B” in “SOBA” indicates their purpose is to deliver flexible IT resources to meet continually changing business needs. Does it make sense, then, to consider an enterprise mashup to be a rich, collaborative SOBA consumer environment? For a mashup to be an enterprise mashup in that it addresses a particular business problem, tight coupling between provider and consumer software would be a serious concern. Most of today’s mashups, however, care little about loose coupling. Mashups that meet business needs, therefore, will require SOA, and the SOA infrastructure necessary to guarantee loose coupling. Without that loose coupling, mashups are little more than toys from the enterprise perspective. Most importantly, however, SOBAs require governance. Clearly, no business would risk allowing any of its employees to assemble and reassemble business processes willy nilly, with no controls in place to ensure that the resulting SOBAs followed corporate policies. The problem is, today’s mashups are inherently ungoverned. The bottom line is, the more governed an enterprise mashup becomes, the less like a Web 2.0-style mashup it’ll be. In any case, the true promise of SOBAs depends upon user interfaces sophisticated enough for a broader business audience to use. Few such tools exist today, but the writing is on the wall: the enterprise mashup is the future of the SOBA consumer.

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