PracticalSOA

This is bold (and if you are a data geek, it is CSV manna from heaven:)): a publicly viewable “dashboard” that shows the health of IT projects in the Federal Government.

You can check out the dashboard through this page or go directly to the dashboard and play around with the interactive charts. (Yes, full drill-down capabilities are included.)

Not only that, the website also lets you directly pull data from the sources and analyze it yourself.

Of course, like any other analytical system, the real work probably begins now: ensuring quality of data, timeliness of updates and all the other mundane details that high-paid consultants don’t want to work on

But for this first step, hats off to the administration. The NY Times covered this story, as did ZDNet, which calls it “a great example of how to promote IT”.

This post by a Gartner analyst-blogger left me a bit confused. (Link Via)

Yes, Anthony is right, there is no such thing as a “data mashup”. Good. But a part of me can’t help but wonder why, or to whom, that question is relevant. Anyone other than an industry analyst, that is.

My company builds and delivers composite applications for SAP customers. Not one of them has ever asked us for a definition of a composite application or if what we are building is indeed a true mashup. The question “are you using HTTP/REST/SOAP/RSS/XML/ATOM?” has not been asked even once. What they are asking us are questions like “will your application make our sales operations process better?” and “our account planning cycle takes too long - how can you shorten it?”

No disrespect to Anthony Bradley, but seriously, why should customers care for vendors’ descriptions of their offerings?