The Changing Role of IT Departments in Enterprise Mashup Environments

A new paradigm, known as Enterprise Mashups, implicates a shift concerning the service development and consumption process: end users combine and reuse existing Web-based resources within minutes to new applications in order to solve an individual and ad-hoc business problem. In such democratized operational environments, the role of IT departments is changing. They are no longer solely responsible for developing or installing business applications. Instead, end users in the business units compose their own operational environment in a collaborative manner. This paper analyses and discusses challenges and the changing role of IT departments toward service intermediaries by leveraging the St. Gallen Media Reference Model (MRM).