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Mashups are among the hot applications that CIOs are likely to hear a lot about in the coming months. They should pay attention, experts say. Mashups can provide unique and innovative applications that can help the business in a number of ways. But since they involve the development of applications outside the IT department, they can also present management headaches and a cultural shift for IT.

Mashups are customized Web applications that combine information or content from multiple, disparate sources. They began life several years ago as consumer offerings on the Web. But there’s a trend toward adopting mashups in the enterprise, according to Forrester Research. The firm projects that the enterprise mashup market, which emerged just three or four years ago, will grow to nearly $700 million by 2013.

Forrester says mashup platforms, which it defines as software products that enable end users to create, deploy and share Web applications by combining multiple data sources with little or no coding, are poised to garner a huge share of the mashup market. But “an entire ecosystem of mashup technology and data providers is emerging to complement those platforms,” the firm says in a report released in May.

And not all mashup platforms will come from vendors. “Among enterprises, there is a growing usage of mashups; this does not necessarily translate to a better market for vendors, because many enterprises are [creating] their own mashup platforms,” says Vishwanath Venugopalan, enterprise software analyst at The 451 Group.

“IT departments are unable to service specialized business needs that require niche applications,” Venugopalan says. “ Enterprise mashups represent point solutions to specialized business problems; in most cases they are simple enough that end users without specialized IT training can develop them.”

The most immediate benefits of mashups for enterprises are faster time to market for new applications on the business side and ease of deployment on the IT side, Venugopalan says. “Over the longer term, enterprises may stand to benefit strategically from unified views of disparate business” processes, he says. E nterprises can use mashups as a way to foster innovation throughout the organization.

But the adoption of mashups in the enterprise comes with challenges. “The biggest challenges to implementing an enterprise mashup platform are technical and cultural,” Venugopalan says. “Technically, a lot of the data that will power these mashups is locked up in various intranet repositories. Getting them out of these repositories in a form that can be easily used in a mashup isn’t always easy.”

Culturally, parts of IT will have to undergo a shift toward managing platforms rather than applications, Venugopalan says, whereas business users will have to take on some responsibility for putting together their own mashups. In a report on mashups published in March, The 451 Group says “ enterprise guerrilla application development — involving applications developed outside IT departments by technically competent information workers — stands to fundamentally alter the relationship between business units and IT departments.”

IT departments will try to cede just enough control to empower end users, while maintaining a consistent operating environment that adheres to regulatory requirements, the firm says.

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