Enterprise mashup vs. service composition: what fits to reach the next stage in end-user development?

Abstract

While the development of enterprise applications is still relegated to IT departments, we observe a high demand for situational or ad-hoc applications desired by the mass of business end-users. This huge demand cannot be fully implemented by IT departments due to cost reasons and a lack of resources. New approaches in End-User Development (EUD) may help to overcome this gap. Recent approaches emerging in this field comprise new visual composition or programming environments stemming either from Business Process Management and Service-Oriented Architectures or Enterprise Mashup and the Web 2.0 paradigm. In this work, an analysis based on an extended version of the EUD Framework of Sutcliffe et al. is conducted to identify what approach fits to reach the next stage in EUD; the empowerment of the end-users to create their individual solutions with less or even no programming skills required. The analysis indicates that both approaches support EUD to reach this next stage, but Enterprise Mashups currently seem to better satisfy the end-users' demands, especially if situational, ad-hoc, and highly individualized but not too complex solutions have to be developed.