When Alcatel-Lucent bought Programmable Web in late June, it acquired a company that, over the years, had aggregated a dynamic and lively repository of API’s (application programming interfaces), mashups and, most importantly documentation. That documentation includes a newsfeed (yup, even resorting to RSS) to highlight when the likes of Twitter, Digg, Amazon, Bit.ly, Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook and thousands of others add new bells, whistles, features or content to their “clouds.”

All this activity and creativity “in the cloud” comes at a time when we continue to hear about the classic backlog in enterprise IT departments. While executives from marketing or the contact center look for ways to support “social CRM” or “cross channel customer support,” the IT department has to grapple with what it considers first order concerns like network security, data integrity or compliance to a slew of strictures from SarBox to HIPAA to PCI.

The current situation sets up IT to be the “can’t do” entity in a “can do” era. This is why so much of the Web-based marketing and commerce activity happens “outside of” or some say “in spite of” enterprise IT. In the contact center domain, which is arguably where computers and communications systems first learned to talk to one another, “integration with back end systems” always takes longer than setting up a speech-enabled IVR and call routing system on the “front-end”.

Now that multi-channel (phone, Web, text, video) or cross-channel (Web-chat, IM-phone) contact centers are becoming more commonplace, IT departments are challenged to keep up to a much more dynamic and fast changing world. Latency is the villain for customers (who can’t stand to be put on hold), contact center managers (who, likewise, monitor average hold times, but also detest the time it takes for IT to support a new report or installation of a new agent “portal”) and departmental heads (who look for speed when getting activity reports to support their business objectives).

I argue that it’s time for enterprise IT departments to publish their own API’s. Actually, it would be better if they maintained their own private versions of Programmable Web. On its home page PW describes itself as “more than a directory and community, it’s programmable” adding that it provides application developers (who can be enterprise employees or third parties) with “a simple and structured way to access the powerful registry and repository capabilities of PW.” Just replace “PW” with “IT” and let the magic happen.

I’m an analyst and I don’t code. Much of what I describe may already be taking place. I know that the leading enterprise IT infrastructure providers (IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, SAP…) and the contact center infrastructure providers (Avaya, Genesys (Alcatel-Lucent), Cisco, Aspect, InIn…) have tools and “integrated development environments”) that look something like PW, but something’s missing. I think it’s the intent to support agile development that can be blessed by IT as it goes about it’s business of keeping core infrastructure elements secure and reliable.

Update: Programmable Web’s RSS feed posted this story about a steep increase in demand for IP folks familiar with mashups (and APIs)

Categories: Articles

Tags: Cloud Computing, Contact Centers, Recombinant Communications, Enterprise Software, Mashups