A Mashup Gives New Meaning to 'Military Intelligence'

It's been said that enterprise mashups are "a solution in search of a problem." Here's a problem: Start with a large federal agency that gathers and analyzes intelligence data across the military services. Much of the work is accomplished by many highly skilled data- and analytical-specialists whose IT needs are extremely complex and sensitive. Add a national disaster, 9/11, and a mandate: Get your act together: Do it better — much better.

Here was a solution: The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) looked at the diversity of information sources, studied the requirements of its analysts, took into account the crucial need for security, and decided to use mashups. This was in 2005 when the term mashup was exotic to the IT vocabulary. What made a compelling case for mashup technology? "It was the flexibility," says Steven Willett, DIA's technical project manager. "We wanted the full Ajax methodology in an agile framework that could plug into our other systems for security, authentication, and services deployment."

Rather than roll their own framework for the mashup project, DIA selected the JackBe NQ Suite Ajax Platform, which provided a foundation for data and presentation layer components. Working with JackBe consultants, the DIA developed Overwatch, a dashboard application that acts as a Virtual Operating Center. Overwatch integrates a wide range of intelligence sources into a desktop presentation, essentially a military situation-awareness dashboard. The program has become a key tool senior analysts use to track resources around the world in real time. To put it mildly, it's mission critical.

It was also the first SOA presentation layer in the Department of Defense Intelligence Information Systems (DoDIIS) inventory. "DoDIIS is moving toward a comprehensive SOA," says Willett. "We needed this project to leverage SOA from the inception, especially to standardize the data services."

It's fair to say that Overwatch, now going on two years of operation, is one of the most successful Web 2.0 applications in government, and has attracted good PR for the agency. That doesn't mean it was an easy sell. There were objections, but as Steve Willett puts it, "We could demonstrate to the analysts that they were in charge of the presentation; they could capture the data the way they wanted to. That's what moved the project beyond the objections." The DIA Overwatch program is almost an extreme mashup — maps, graphics, animations blended with extraordinarily diverse data under very strict governance — but its ability to do the job in a demanding environment illustrates the potential of enterprise mashups: flexible but standardized, customized but modular, personalized but secure. Such difficult virtues have attracted major vendors such as IBM and Microsoft to enterprise mashup technology, as well as several innovative smaller companies such as JackBe, Serena Software, and Kapow Technologies. IBM in particular has recently come forward with products (Mashup Center, WebSphere sMash) that demonstrate its commitment to mashups, and ,because of its influence, help to validate the idea of mashups in the enterprise.

Not that enterprise mashups should really need advocacy. After all, "mashup" is just a peculiar word for taking data from a variety of sources and providing it to a group of savvy users so they can easily choose for themselves what data they need and how to present it. "We look at it as the natural evolution of delivering information to people who need to make decisions," says Willet. IT has been working on this forever. What's new are the advantages of the Internet and Web application technology, which are changing the game for some very old problems.