Data mashups for the most part are made possible by the advent of the world wide web. Data mashups have the potential to be major enablers for business operations and customer service to leverage the ever increasing amount of business data that is available today. A data mashup is defined as a web page or application that combines data or functionality from two or more external sources to create a new service. A real estate listing service combined with Google Maps is an example of a mashup.
Business Mashups. Businesses are starting to apply mashups to support business operations and customer service. The key thing for a business mashup is that it be actionable, not just “eye candy”. Just because you can mash together an Excel spreadsheet to data in your ERP system is not a good reason to do it. A good example of a business mashup is where you combine data from your order management system and transportation management system in order to improve customer service. See posting, Business Mashups, for more on mashups.
Data Mashups for Supply Chains. Data mashups and near-real-time data synchronization is a new and interesting trend in B2B eCommerce. Here IT companies are enabling businesses and supply chains to synchronize their data to get better information. Instead of just transporting, translating, and securing data, more B2B eCommerce service providers are helping to synchronize data to help business get better visibility over products, movement of goods, and visibility over key supply chain processes such as product and shipment order management. See posting on Data Mashups To Leverage New Supply Chain Technology for how businesses and service providers are using data mashups to improve decision-making and make new information services.
Enterprises Mashups, Business Intelligence (BI), and Data Warehouses. Large businesses have many internal data sources such as invoice data, purchase orders, shipment status, inventory data, and so on. Traditionally, large companies have used data warehouses to combine and integrate different sources of data. The challenge with using a data warehouse is normally data warehouses can only be access by the few and adding new data sources can take months if not years. Using a mashup approach and mashup software tools, it is possible to integrate different data sources in hours or days. See Enterprise Web 2.0 Blog’s posting, When it Comes to Enterprise Mashups …, for the what, why, and hows of enterprise mashups.
