Note: This is a repost of a piece I published last October that received a lot of attention. The only updates I've made are to make it temporally correct.

I was talking with one of my colleagues yesterday about Popfly. He'd heard of it and had a general idea of what it was all about, but was looking for more. I had been going on for awhile (as I am prone to doing from time to time) about how cool Popfly was and how it gives non-technologists an opportunity to use their creativity in building interesting composite applications.

The he asked me, "What do you think the relevance of Popfly is outside of the 'Wow, this is cool' market?"

I hadn't really thought about that. I mean, creating a mashup with Virtual Earth and Flickr to let people see where you took your photo and then actually look at them is fun, but what untapped value might be there for businesses?

SOA As It Is Today

I've spent the last several years of my career espousing the merits and benefits of the service-oriented approach to system architecture. While the idea itself isn't all that new, the technology we have at our fingertips these days is the component that was missing with prior attempts at making SOA practical.

The concept of implementing SOA in the real world has always been centered around identifying key business processes and capabilities and designing services to address them, while, of course, following the tenets of SOA, i.e. platform agnosticism, standards-based implementation, etc. Once these services are deployed, an organization's architecture group plans for how to extend these services, as well as how to leverage composite services which compose multiple fine-grained services. For the most part, developers were responsible for building the business applications that consume the service infrastructure. So, in the end equation, the IT organization controlled the design and development of the SOA and the line-of-business applications that consumed it. This can lead to obvious tension between the user base and IT, as well as stretching the valuable resources of the IT group very thin. Users tend to be unhappy with IT's performance, and IT's morale tends to be low, as they are always being asked to do more with less on shorter time frames.

Enter Popfly...To the Enterprise!

Popfly is a tool that allows users to visually design composite applications using so-called "services in the cloud." Each gadget in the Popfly tools frame represents a service out in the world somewhere that can be easily clicked and dragged onto the design pallet, configured and "mashed" with other services to produce one application. This application might enjoy long-term use, or it could be fulfilling an ad hoc need. Either way, the application is built quickly and done so without writing any code.

Now let's make a "mashup" of our own: Combine Popfly with a well constructed SOA inside the enterprise. What might that look like?

Imagine giving your business customers the ability to view a tool box of service "gadgets" that they simply drag into a design space where they can mash data together and build their own line-of-business applications on their own.

This would be a tremendous step toward empowering users to more fully leverage IT assets within their companies. The benefits would include:

• Happier Users: I have to believe that, in most organizations, IT and the rest of the business don't skip merrily through a field of flowers together, holding hands and signing happy songs. In most cases, the business has huge requirements on short time frames and limited resources, and IT has to try to make it work. While this approach won't necessarily resolve this tension (I'm sure it can ever be truly resolved), letting users take a "self-serve" approach to addressing some of their own software needs, should go a long way to taking some of the pressure off already stretched IT teams.
• Happier Architects: The hunt for the ideal value proposition for SOA would be achieved. When SOA becomes the foundation of most of the line-of-business applications in your company, the value and ROI become far easier to measure and realize.
• Happier Developers: This might be a bit contentious. I mean, it could be argued that this whole thing could cost developers their jobs by reducing their relevancy in the company. I would argue, however, that this would take a lot of the menial development projects off of their plates and let them focus on the big, meaty, interesting projects. You see, this idea isn't a silver bullet solution. Using a Popfly-like application to mash some services together will take care of the "I need it now and I need it once" kind of requests IT gets from their users. In any sizable organization that significantly leverages technology to run their business, there will always be a place for more advanced applications and systems. And, thus, there will always be a place for developers, but developers focusing on the more challenging projects.

I should point out that in no way, shape or form has anyone from Microsoft suggested to me that this is even on the radar screen. I think it would be interesting to take the "cool" and "fun" technology that is Popfly and make it something that could provide real value to business in their everyday work.

What do you think?