What are the Business Benefits of Enterprise Mashups?
Abstract
Enterprise mashup is a new development paradigm which empowers users from the business units to create individual applications without the involvement of the IT department. Unlike the service-oriented architecture paradigm, which allows the automation of structured business processes, enterprise mashups represent a technology of the next corporate technology adoption wave characterized by the peer production philosophy. It enables the automation of unstructured processes relevant for knowledge workers which could not be modeled in advanced. An open and unaddressed question in the scientific community is the discussion of the benefits of this new paradigm. This paper closes this gap by designing a benefit model. By following the design science approach, we leverage the balance scorecard concept to structure and identify the benefits items from a holistic point of view. By means of a case study and an organized laboratory experiment, we demonstrate the applicability of the designed model and quantify the benefits. As a result, our research proves the driving force of user-orientation and provides practical guidelines for the implementation of future grassroots enterprise mashup environments.