Enterprise Mashups = Service Oriented Reporting?

Josh Holmes posted here about the article on Enterprise Mashups he recently co-wrote with Larry Clarkin for Architecture Journal. 

It's a good article, and he talks about presenting the paper at SAF (Strategic Architect Forum) recently, and the feedback that he and Larry received from attendees.  A brief quote:

"Enablement and Governance were the two largest parts of the discussion. How do I safely allow more people to create mashups without compromising the IT department, the data and everything that we hold near and dear? The fear, that I think that we resolved, is that this is the Excel or Access database of this generation and that if we as the IT department don't have control over it that we will have the wild west and everyone will be working off of non-record data. The counter point is that if someone is creating a mashup with approved services, they are actually leveraging the authoritative data source rather than creating new rogue ones."

Sounds like a good discussion.  Here's a little different angle for approaching this topic.... 

Reporting tools have been building a primitive form of mashups in the enterprise for a long time.  The ad hoc reporting tools (e.g., Business Objects and even Excel) feel the most "mashup-y" to me, as you can put together any data sources that can be meaningfully related.  On the other hand, structured reporting tools offer the "live" connection to data.  If these capabilities came together in single tool to expose enterprise services along side the more traditional data sources like a BO universe or a relational data store, you'd be 90% of the way there to an enterprise mashup tool, wouldn't you?  And if some of the services were external, then you'd be all the way there - or darn close, I think. 

With all the attention SOA, service repositories, service composition, and service governance have gotten, it's interesting to me that something like enterprise mashups have not emerged under the name "service oriented reporting". 

Maybe because mashups emerged first in the consumer world the reporting technology providers were not "tuned in" to this trend very early on?  Or, perhaps this just shows the real genius of Popfly?  That is, now that it's here as an example, enterprise mashups just seem like such an obviously good idea.  Whatever the case, enterprise mashups by any name look to me like an innovation that reporting providers could capitalize on -- or be disrupted by. 

Technorati tags: SOA, enterprise mashups, reporting, popfly