Not deploying RIAs is “not an option.”
I stumbled across this report discussing Web 2.0 within an enterprise context, which I would like to recommend:
“Web 2.0 Gets Down to Business”.
The report discusses the results of an Information Week survey and presents some interesting charts and numbers, e.g. why companies introduced RIAs , or what type of apps are in the pipeline.
(…) rich apps are the wave of the future as Web users, customers, and employees demand capabilities matching what they’ve experienced on cutting-edge sites. IT must respond, either by effectively outsourcing development or by delivering the goods itself.
(…)
But IT can get a lot of return from a more fluid user experience for employees, too. Many insurance companies create RIAs for their sales agents, using platforms such as Adobe Flex to create forms that make it easier to complete complex insurance applications and pass them in an industry-standard format to underwriting systems. Other companies use RIAs to deliver personalized management dashboards – the No. 1 choice when we asked what apps are in planning or development – as well as workflow and multimedia training tools.
Data visualization is another common RIA use that can transform the productivity and creativity level of managers and knowledge workers. A telecom company might use an RIA to support engineers by providing a visual view of complex network events and possible correlations to problems. Though RIAs generally are overkill for simple Web forms and information displays, they’re particularly well suited to support complex interactions with multiple inputs and pages, large data sets, and the multimedia content seen in geospatial data or complex medical records, for example.
