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