Business Process Lego

Most of us will remember building things with Lego as a child. Lego, the company, sold bricks of various sizes and shapes and left it up to the imagination of children to use them to build whatever they wanted. The results were often very complex models that the Lego designers had never even considered would be built when they sold the bricks.

Over the years, Lego has brought out new components. These components can fit into a Lego model because they comply with the standard interlocking brick bumps, but each component offers additional functionality of its own. These components have included doors, trees and drawbridges and even more recently components that are programmable by a computer. By making these advanced components available along with the original standard Lego bricks, much more complex models can be created and innovation is fostered.

Here’s where we get a bit abstract. Imagine if in business, companies provided components that complied with a common standard so that they could be linked together and built into an overall solution. SalesForce.com, for example, might provide a component that gives you an employee’s details if you gave it the employee number. Google might provide a component that gives you a map if you gave it an address. Quickbooks might give you an account balance if you gave it an account number. If you wanted to create an application that updates an employee’s details, you might put these components together and very quickly you would have a working Internet based application.

A solution built with business process Lego

Some companies already provide these components in a format called a WebService. (Click here for an example of Dunn and Bradstreet’s credit rating check WebServices.)

Serena is about to launch a new product called Mashup Composer which will allow you to effectively use business process Lego to create exciting new applications much more quickly than if you developed them from scratch. This can empower those who are not software developers to be innovative and build simple web applications of their own. Now no one is suggesting that they will build the next national healthcare management system, but they can build simple web applications for getting things approved, recording complaints, or managing leave requests for example.

I will be discussing these exciting developments in the world of business mashups in the coming months in this blog.