Mashups aren't for everyone
While this could be considered heresy to suggest that not everyone in the connected world will prefer to create a mashup, it is clear that mashups are helpful to many. There is a key need to be able to pull information together and shape it around a specific task. When I approve budget expenses, I'd like to see what I've approved in the past, the pending approvals, and the committed expenses as well. Alas, this information comes from many different sources (BI Analytics, transactional systems, spreadsheets, etc.). So I'd like to easily pull this information together. This is what we like to call Enterprise Mashups. It's more than just a regular mashup because to date every example primarily is tied to or includes a map in some way. We know that business users often times need to combine information together that doesn't strictly rely on location based information.
Ok, so now that we've coved a brief view on mashups, why can't anyone use them? Everyone can use them, but everyone won't use them. This is due to two reasons: ease of use and myopic views of the task at hand. For the first one, we've done a lot of work with the Internet Portal provides and they have hundreds of millions of users every day using their sites. They even make it extremely simple to add components to an existing page. Look at My Yahoo! for example. The way to add a component to a page is by clicking the edit link then checking off a couple of boxes, and viola, the page is personalized to exactly what the user wants. However, only about 15% of all users personalize their page and the UI doesn't get much simpler than this!
Second, most users don't troll around the systems they use every day to see if there's something more it can do for them. They simple get in, perform a specific task, and then move on. They don't have this surplus of time to find new capabilities and information.
An answer to both of these issues needs to be that the enterprise mashup system needs to "advertise" the new components that are relevant to the user. And then it has to provide the user with an easy way to add the component to the page. Without these two elements, any enterprise mashup or mashup in general is destined to be underutilized.
