Engagement is the Elusive “Last Mile” to Effective Enterprise Systems

By Brian Wick

An organization can build a state-of-the-art system, with SOA and business process management (BPM) solutions working together to streamline business processes, only to come up against another hurdle: the people who are supposed to use these systems - customers, partners, employees, citizens - are often unable to because they lack the skills, interest, or computing tools to do so.

The reality is that abandonment of online business processes and transactions remains high. Recent studies show that more than half of all citizens still prefer calling a government agency for services that can also be handled online, and only a small percentage of banking customers want to complete transactions over the Web. The failure to engage people in more automated, streamlined processes typically results in high attrition, overloaded customer service centers, low conversion rates, lengthy cycle times, and missed opportunities.

Fortunately, there’s an increasingly powerful tool available to close the engagement gap between critical back-end systems and end-user communities: rich Internet applications (RIAs). RIAs can be integrated into next-generation solutions - Enterprise 2.0 - that link enterprise systems with engaging front-end interfaces that provide users with richer and more responsive client-side functionality. Since RIAs don’t need to keep interacting with remote servers, they also deliver faster responses to users. Combined with powerful back-end systems, RIAs offer organizations the opportunity to securely extend business processes to target audiences inside and outside corporate firewalls.

Transforming User Experiences

“Using RIAs means that, instead of having mostly static front-end pages in HTML, we can develop more engaging interfaces that support visualizations for improved data analysis and communicating results,” said Jimmy Gianninas, an RIA developer at financial services company Optimal Payments.

Users like RIAs because they can pull data from multiple locations and integrate easily with a back-end system to automatically generate customized information or initiate processes across workgroups. For instance, banking employees don’t have to launch several applications just to open a new customer account and generate service documents, while citizens can find out what government benefits they’re entitled to without spending hours filling in forms and weeks waiting for replies. At the same time, online shoppers can evaluate different options for the vacation package they’re considering just by dragging and dropping items on screen and receiving a custom packet with prices, travel itineraries, and pictures.

The first ROI metrics are starting to come in for real-world business processes fronted by RIAs, and they’re looking good. “Since deploying new RIA-based services for our banking clients, the volume of customers opening online accounts has increased by as much as 33 percent,” commented John Weber of GeVaSyS/VWD, vice executive director technology solutions of VWD group, a leading German full-service provider for banks in the area of retail banking, private banking and wealth management solutions. “Equally important, the quality of customers submitting inquiries online has improved for many of our clients, with more than 90 percent of interested customers qualifying for and accessing bank services."

Start with the Business Process

RIAs help organizations cover the “last mile,” but to succeed an organization needs an engagement strategy that clearly outlines how the new business processes and RIAs will work together with backend systems to help users to better accomplish their tasks.

For example, at MFG.com, the world’s largest manufacturing marketplace, an elegant RIA interface integrated with dynamic document generation and processing systems allows buyers and sellers to collaborate in complex transactions as they procure materials or sell goods ranging from glue guns to Mars landing modules. Using the intuitive online services, buyers can set up custom request for quote (RFQ) templates to specify what they need, when they need it, and where they need it to go. Suppliers from around the world can quote on those RFQs. Built-in rights management capabilities can help complete the collaboration cycle, protecting intellectual property by limiting who can access information and when they can view it.

At the interface level, MFG.com uses RIAs to move relevant content in and out of the interface. A process-focused RIA such as the MFG.com application can manage massive amounts of data - including CAD files in platform- and application-independent Portable Document Format (PDF) files, cached, and pushed to users on demand - providing all project team members with instant access to current, relevant information. Numbers can change in real time based on all transactions in progress.

Applications Repackaged to Meet Customer Needs

The platform-agnostic nature of RIAs enables users to work with their preferred devices. “RIAs overcome problems delivering applications that operate in a variety of Web browsers. We can create leading-edge interfaces that support the experiences that end users want today - and the types of Web experiences that will be common in the future," said Gianninas.

Further RIA benefits result from the fact that RIAs provide information in the context of roles. These “adaptive applications” can present the same data differently, depending on the user and the process. For example, an insurance company can provide its financial managers an RIA for analyzing subscriber rates across regions, giving managers new insight into the company’s profitability. At the same time, a variation of this RIA could be used for customers shopping for the most affordable and comprehensive coverage based on a variety of criteria. Both users rely on much of the same data, but the application adapts to their different needs.

Ease of use can even be a competitive differentiator, whether the RIAs that provide it are targeted at employees or customers. Customers like getting what they want; employees appreciate being able to get their jobs done without hearing too many customer complaints. "The electronic health records market is filled with solutions that are big on functionality, yet small on ease of use,” explained Scott Jens, president of EyeCodeRight. “Combining RIAs with enterprise systems, we can deliver everything - powerful functionality, database integration, and ease of use - in a single application. It's an important advantage that helps us stand out in a crowded market.”

Ease of Use Attracts, but Functionality Seals the Deal

Ultimately, ease of use alone isn’t a good predictor of long-term success when trying to automate and integrate front- and backend processes. An RIA can get users to give a new process a try, but unless that new way of interacting delivers the goods - or services, or information - more quickly and more comprehensively than traditional channels, users won’t come back. Instead they’ll revert to the processes they know.

The good news is that many tools are already available to help organizations perfect both the front end and back ends of their business processes. Today’s best tools for BPM have already been proven in implementations worldwide. The next step is extending these solutions to users via RIAs that bring new immediacy and ease of use to any process, delivering real-world benefits to companies and their customers alike.

About the Author:

Brian Wick, director at Adobe Systems, manages the marketing for the company’s LiveCycle ES product suite, helping to set the go-to-market strategy, developing positioning and messaging, identifying new business opportunities, and establishing product pricing.

Wick came to Adobe in 2004. Prior to joining Adobe, he was vice president of marketing at Intraspect Software, a provider of collaboration and content management solutions. Before working at Intraspect, Wick held a variety of senior management positions at Documentum and Oracle, where he helped launch Oracle 8. For more on Adobe, go to www.adobe.com.