A Business Case for RIA, part 3

Last time I described how RIA improves the quality of business services and quickens customer decision-making. In this second part I'll describe how RIA can reduce the cost of operations.

RIA decreases cost of business operations

RIA allows businesses to streamline and simplify access to key business functions. Indeed, many organizations are leveraging RIA to increase efficiency of operations. But by becoming more efficient, organizations are reaping an additional benefit of RIA in reducing the cost of operations.

The efficiency of an organization is often measured by how fast it can respond to markets, address customer needs or even navigate temporary road blocks. Having a streamlined process in place that addresses the core needs of the business provides the means to efficiently deliver on the core expectations, every time. Providing streamlined capabilities in support of the core business allows more to get done with less. These benefits can be achieved up and down the organization.

Starting with the customer, having an efficient means for customers to engage with your business, whether in the delivery of products or services, allows your company to reduce the cost of support. Fewer incidents are raised if a customer can get what they need more easily and readily. In addition, having an efficient and easily understandable RIA for internal operations allows businesses to operate with a more productive staff, be it for customer support or on a factory floor.

RIA also allows organizations to bring their ideas to market sooner and cheaper. This is because RIA tools provide the means for efficient and effective prototyping. In addition, RIA toolkits make it much easier to do prototyping using the same technology stack, allowing prototypes to continue as finished products. Plus, the event based programming model used by RIA toolkits makes development of rich user interfaces much easier than with traditional programming. Further, due to the depth of supporting tools and accompanying middleware, businesses can accelerate development against a wide variety of back-end resources, including existing application servers, web services, databases, message queues, etc.

In addition, RIA allows the synergies between business users and designers discovered during prototyping to continue throughout the development process. This is because RIA tools facilitate a separation of UI design from development. Most RIA toolkits provide designer-centric tools and developer-centric tools which both point at a common set of application components. This allows for a more natural and less disruptive separation of responsibility: developers build the internal system infrastructure, designers and business users create the external user experience. Because of this efficiency and speed organizations reap a tremendous gain on cost.

Conclusion

RIA enables organizations to build new kinds of web applications with features and capabilities previously unimagined. The benefits of RIA to the business are numerous. To summarize and recap:

• RIA can help deepen customer relationships by providing the means to engage them as if in person
• RIA can greatly simplify complex operations, leading to better sales, leads, customer retention, order completions and overall brand satisfaction
• RIA can help businesses create compelling experiences for its users that make them want to come back
• RIA can improve interaction with external customers and internal operations in intuitive and innovate ways, leading to clearer decision-making, more productivity and a real competitive advantage
• RIA can empower businesses to build highly interactive applications quickly and at reduced cost

A Business Case for RIA, part 2

Last month I described an an important advantage RIA can bring to your business by providing increased market share through improved brand recognition. In this second part I'll describe how RIA can improve your business's efficiency and effectiveness.

RIA improves efficiency and effectiveness of business

Organizations are turning to RIA to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their business. This is because a successful RIA design can greatly simplify and streamline the user interaction and allow people to get what they need done more quickly. The ability to take complex business operations and turn them into something simple is much more achievable with today's RIA technologies than what was once available.

For example, in sites built with traditional web technologies, a multi-step task often required page flipping to capture information in piecemeal fashion and would have to process and display interim results for steps that affect one another. This created an artificial interruption in the user experience - essentially creating a business process workaround simply due to technology-imposed constraints. The result was often a frustrating and confusing user experience. Now, a highly interactive RIA interface can represent complex, multi-step tasks directly and intuitively on a single screen.

Extending upon the example above, options were often limited in the ability to display complex data in an intuitive and natural way. The information presented was usually static and did not allow much in terms of interactivity. Through RIA, data exploration can be a more interactive experience, allowing users to navigate through large bodies of data by looking at charts and drilling down into sections, and enabling users to visually process increasing levels of detail at their own pace. When users are able to manipulate data through visualization, data that was once complex becomes more understandable, just by making the visual representation simpler, more manageable and more interactive.

RIA improves user productivity by providing features previously unavailable to traditional HTML-based web sites. The types of controls available are much more robust and provide higher interactivity. Most RIA designs that employ these controls enable users to receive timely feedback on their input decisions through real-time tactile responses, which provides information to the user in a very intuitive and natural way. This quickens delivery of the message and helps reduce errors. It also makes working with a sophisticated system much less complicated to operate. Users are better able to visualize the result of their choices in real-time, which reduces time, effort and energy to complete their tasks and leaves the user feeling satisfied.

RIA technologies also lend to a better user experience because of the speed at which these applications operate. This is because the underlying RIA technologies work in more efficient ways to transmit data back and forth. In traditional web sites data is transmitted as text over HTTP where lots of bandwidth is consumed. With RIA there are better options and support for data transmission, including binary data and other remoting protocols, which makes the entire experience better because the application is more responsive.

Next up

Thanks for reading. In my third and final segment in this series I'll describe how RIA decreases the cost of business operations.

A Business Case for RIA, part 1

Why RIA?

The advent of rich internet applications (RIA) empowers organizations to create a new brand of user interfaces brimming with features and capabilities previously unimagined - features and capabilities that make completing complex tasks appear effortless and enjoyable. This is in stark contrast to the cumbersome interaction models developed prior to RIA, which could flow in unnatural ways or present artificial constraints on the user due to limitations in the available technologies.

The subject of this three part series is to present how RIA can benefit an organization in relation to three major business objectives:

1. Increase market share
2. Improve efficiency and effectiveness
3. Reduce costs

RIA increases market share through improved brand recognition

More and more organizations are learning why investing in a compelling user experience is so important for their brand. They are learning that improved accessibility to their products and services via easy to use software is a necessary component to growing and improving awareness in the brand campaign. Software which pleases users and helps them better interact with a company increases user adoption of that company's products and services. This in turn encourages return visits, which in turn helps build market share and trust. RIA helps organizations achieve that trust.

A well designed rich Internet application engages, captivates and motivates users to follow a task to its completion. It evokes a positive, emotional response for an otherwise routine, complex or uninspiring activity. It leaves users with a favorable impression of a company's brand and products, which can be a higher market differentiator than competing on cost alone. Many brands have successfully employed RIA to promote their offerings and drive momentum through a positive user experience. A brand can claim success when their site generates buzz, increases traffic and retains customer loyalty.

A successful RIA campaign fosters brand loyalty, recognition and customer intimacy. It provides differentiation, innovation and a competitive advantage. It serves to deepen customer relationships by simplifying communication, and it encourages repeat usage through familiarity and ease of use. All of these factors yield to increased sales and market share for a highly recognized brand.

Next up

In my next post I'll continue this discussion and show how RIA can improve efficiency and effectiveness of business.