John Markoff of the NY Times has written a great article entitled “Software Out There“. He begins by saying “The Internet is entering its Lego era.”

With people pulling together mashups or information available through an increasing array of vendor APIs, Markoff is correct. But, all this is happening on the open Internet. It is not happening within the enterprise. At least not very easily.

If a company’s whole IT department dedicates itself to a Services-orientated Architecture or SOA, it might be possible to build it yourself.

To make this happen, the CTO has to force every developer within an organization to build their applications as though they were building a Google maps, with an external API. So, the requirement for companies now has increased. First, having mashable applications within the enterprise means you have to build it yourself, and now you have to build it really really well too.

Generally, this is a crazy approach. Most home brew enterprise applications are little more than automated spreadsheets put together by people who have never built and deployed an entire Web Application.

If you head over to Wikipedia’s list of SOA related products, you find a long list of all the major software development platforms.

A development platform is not an end user software product. Sounds crazy to even have to say that, but it is an important point.

Google maps, which is the most famous mashup tool out there, is an end user product.

So far, there are no enterprise level tools that are being sold with an API that is simple enough to allow them to be mashed together with other enterprise tools.

For vendors to start selling products as officially mashablethis requires broad adoption of some simple standards. Any vednor who’s product kicks out information available in an RSS format could say they have some things that are “officially mashable”. And this could be really useful. Imagine if your HR software kicked out an internal RSS feed of each new hire. Better yet, what if your order systems did the same thing.

To make this really succeed within the enterprise requires a few more standards. Most importantly, standards that can knit together access control for AJAX Badges.