Granted, REST and SOAP are web services. What I mean is something more along the lines of "the secret sauce/magic powder that takes all our integration woes away." The point is the same as in Steve's recent post: if the "do the shit that works, not that's elegant" crowd can figure it out, Greasemonkey can be made to fix a lot of the integration and terminal-waiting-for-features problems IT has.
What are these integration and terminal-waiting-for-features" problems? Well, as I understand it, there's quite a lot of web application both behind and outside the firewall. They work marginally well, and they certainly were nifty back in '99 when they were last really reved. If you work in a huge company, with a zillion web apps for doing everything from filing for reimbursements to go to The Swamp, to entering the time you spent programming and getting coffee, you know exactly what I mean.
Now, no one likes a bunch of separate UI's for their daily life. Everyone wants one page, the hallowed "single pane of glass" that pops up and says:
Greetings. This is master control. Here are the things you must to today:
Tell me how you spent you time yesterday.
Update your status on these 5 items.
Click this button to agree that you've read this new policy.
Would you like to be reimbursed for driving to and fro The Swamp?
(Well, no one wants to be faced with a list like that, but I'd certainly prefer it to keeping track of all those PostIt's with different whacky URLs I have to go to, logins, clickity-click-click-clicks and typing with bizarre UIs to just to get my shit done.)
Now, you're certainly not going to get all those vendors to work together to give you an integrated view. You could ask someone(s) to code you up a nice web app that made all that into a sort of dashboard...that'd cost you a pretty penny, and you probably wouldn't like what you got afterwards. Such is enterprise software. But, we all know this.
On the other hand, if you got one of those zaney, Firefox using doofuses ('tip o' the hat to James for the word of the day) to whip up a cart-full of Greasemonkey scripts that pulled all that crap together with a pile of HTML, JavaScript-duct-tape, maybe a PHP/Python/Ruby REST service or two...well, my spend-thrift C*O friends, you might have yourself something that was actually worth the nothing you spent on it.
Good Lord, and if you had your own people do it, you could change and update it whenever you wanted without piles of CMM level 3-5 documentation to fill out.
That said, I'm just a programmer: I don't understand your "initiatives," "business consultants," "vendor sports," or "enterprise systems." I was thawed out of a high school by your Business Men to code up some crazy web application. Your world frightens and confuses me! But I do know one thing: keep it simple, stupid.
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