Information Week ran an interesting article last week on the emergence of mashups and the challenges they pose for IT. With a growing number of tools available to amateur developers, IT departments are finding themselves in the center of conflicting corporate desires.Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft all offer similar tools that allow the unwashed masses to create browser based applications, and their popularity is undeniable.

On the one hand, corporations are beginning to understand the power of new media and social media. At the same time, they increase employee participation and satisfaction, and they're cost-effective. Many mashup tools are free of charge. On the other hand, corporations risk the loss of proprietary data and the chance that an employee will put the wrong public face on the corporation.

In the middle are IT workers, who are simultaneously charged with empowering employees and providing network security. In some situations, the cobbled-together applications are cumbersome, difficult to support or just plain dangerous. Additionally, IT workers are called upon to support tools that they haven't deployed and don't normally use, creating extra work and wasted effort for support staffs that are already stretched thin.The resulting applications can cause problems for enterprise applications that were not designed to work with the mashup tools.

It's a good bet that mashups aren't going away in the near future. At best, IT can control what, where, and how corporate information and non-corporate information are mingled.