Richard, Jnan, and I got a lot out of the Office 2.0 Conference last week in San Francisco. As Richard has already reported, the RIA Technologies panel discussion that I moderated and Jnan represented Curl on was a great success based on the feedback I've received. I thought the conversation was quite lively and we were able to discuss a number of factors influencing the adoption of Rich Internet Applications in businesses in general and the enterprise in particular.
It's clear that adoption patterns are still in an early stage of development and that there are decidedly different attitudes and approaches in different markets and regions about how and when RIAs are appropriate solutions for businesses to consider. Here are a few key observations I took away from the panel and discussions with attendees and exhibitors at the event:
- The current focus on RIA adoption centers on providing a better user experience, gaining a competitive advantage by providing self-service solutions to customers, reducing cycle time in customer engagements, and reducing server loads and latency by offloading more application processing to the client PC.
- Online/offline capabilities are not yet a critical factor driving businesses towards RIA development. Most agree that this will become an increasingly important factor as more line-of-business applications move to the web but today it's more of a checklist feature than a go/no go decision factor.
- The consensus on the panel was that both a grassroots adoption by entities inside an organization and top-down process re-engineering mandate from corporate IT and management are required to drive broader adoption of RIAs in larger organizations. The now-classic examples of instant messaging and wireless infiltration and proliferation inside the firewall were repeatedly invoked by panel participants to suggest how RIA adoption might grow.
- In a similar vein, most agreed that Generation Y/Digital Natives/Millenials (pick your favorite label) entering the workforce in increasing numbers will increase pressures on IT and business management to web-enable more internal and customer-facing processes.
- There was general agreement that there is probably more RIA development and implementation going on in the enterprise than has been publicly documented. Organizations who see their use of RIAs as a competitive advantage are not likely to be interested in drawing a lot of public attention to these efforts in an effort to maintain that edge. So they promote the benefits directly to their internal and external customers but avoid making a lot of public disclosure about the value these initiatives are delivering.
- Interoperability and integration of services and data sources, driven by common standards, well-documented APIs, and an increasing willingness to use the open source model to promote community development, are more important than ever. Increased use of the browser as a delivery window for application functionality provides developers with the opportunity to build solutions that can be accessed on an increasingly broad range of devices and platforms.