I’ve summarized some key points below and you can get a copy of the article from the iRise Website.
“RIAs represent a real opportunity for companies to improve their online offerings because they are the tools that provide Web designers the greatest flexibility in meeting the needs of your brand. But added richness will not always equate to an improved (or even a good) experience. At every point, you must think about what the best possible experience is for your customers.”
The article also included a discussion of the five pitfalls of adopting RIA:
Not understanding customer needs
Implementing for technology’s sake
Creating a distracting experience
Reduced web site performance
Limited metrics tracking and reporting
If you are interested in learning if RIA is right for you and how to avoid the risks, be sure check out the article.
SOA or service-oriented architecture is a chronically hot topic - and there are as many opinions about it as there are IT vendors. According to Wikipedia, SOA is “is a computer system’s architectural style for creating and using business processes, packaged as services, throughout their lifecycle. SOA also defines and provisions the IT infrastructure to allow different applications to exchange data and participate in business processes.” And for a more humorous definition of SOA overload, check out Greg the Architect in the “SOA This, SOA That” video from YouTube.
We recently had an interesting internal email discussion on how iRise deals with SOA and I have excerpted the highlights below:
From Sherrick Murdoff, VP of Alliances and Business Development:
“SOA is most often interpreted as back-end plumbing only, but this is not the case. SOA includes the back-end plumbing, but you don’t start with the back-end plumbing and you don’t start with building web services
What many CIOs and industry leaders have learned and are promoting is to start with the customer experience – this should drive your SOA implementation more than anything. iRise lets you visualize the customer experience and iterate with both end-users and IT to gain alignment on what needs to be built that drives the “how”
Visualizing SOA is important to let the customer experience drive the requirements for what infrastructure you need to put in place
iRise aligns well in any SOA discussion and brings the customer back to what is important – visualizing “what” you need before you begin to think about the “how” you want to implement.”
From Matt Smith, Senior Enterprise Solutions Manager
“Most people over-think the relationship between SOA and simulating applications. SOA basically means there is a provider (machine) and a consumer (machine or human) of a service.
The processing of the service is all the back-end wizardry that goes on within the SOA, which iRise doesn’t diagram in the traditional sense of architecture modeling tools, but it does simulate the action.
The line of business manager and end-user don’t care how the SOA actually processes the service request. iRise simulates the important bit from their perspective of application usability.”
From James McWethy, Enterprise Solutions Director
“SOA…three loaded letters. I’ve seen companies spend years talking about defining and implementing an SOA strategy.
Why not simulate the end-user experience that will result from the tiresome SOA planning process to: (1) Verify that the information being delivered via the service (informational or transactional) will be of value to the end user, and (2) simulate a set of components (portlets, widgets, gadgets, web parts, etc.) that will show the end result of a system comprised of multiple services.
iRise Customer Success Story - At Fusion ‘07, the Customer Experience team from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan gave a presentation on how they used iRise to simulate a technical proof of concept for their new member portal. The presentation is available here and can be viewed here.
So, why risk building your SOA infrastructure without using iRise to engaging your end-users? By simulating the end-user experience with iRise first, both business stakeholders and IT will win.
Interop and Software 2008 at Mandalay Bay Convention centered just wrapped up last week.
James Maguire from Datamation filmed a “virtual booth crawl” with 30 second pitches from select vendors - most of whom were being awarded for innovation in software. You can check it out here or watch below.
Yours truly happened to be manning the booth when James came by. I gave my best 30 second rendition regarding iRise below.
SOA or service-oriented architecture is a chronically hot topic - and there are as many opinions about it as there are IT vendors. According to