Today's companies use multiple systems to run their business and maintain their competitive advantage. It can be a challenge for employees to achieve their organizational objectives using these various application interfaces and procedures. Valuable employee time is lost switching between applications, searching for associated content, and copying and pasting information.
Composite applications, also known as business mashups, can help companies facilitate interaction between multiple systems and streamline employee workflow. Through business mashups, the end users can use multiple applications in a single, unified framework.
Key Benefits
Interaction
- Composite applications support component interaction, helping to reduce the number of steps an employee must take to complete a process and potentially avoiding errors that can occur when working across multiple systems.
- By facilitating interaction between multiple enterprise systems, composite applications can help improve business responsiveness and streamline employee workflow.
Integration
- Composite applications provide unified views of multiple back-end systems and desktop applications that can make end users more productive.
- Composite applications support a broad array of technologies (e.g. Lotus® Notes® NSFs, Java™ or .NET™ - just to name a few), allowing companies to use their existing assets and developer skills to respond quickly to changing business requirements.
- New and updated strategic applications can be distributed to the end user's desktop with local data store, business logic, and rich user interfaces. This eliminates potential bottlenecks of having all applications sitting in a remote data center.
- Composite applications can help companies maintain higher levels of customer service, meet governmental and agency compliance regulations, and overcome diverse technology challenges to obtain stronger operating efficiencies amid the fluid management environment of mergers and consolidations.
Flexible and rapid development
- Existing Lotus® Notes® applications can be reused and aggregated in a composite application.
- New runtime capabilities allow IT to make use of other technologies like Java™ and Eclipse™ to create and aggregate multiple applications - including back-office systems - in a composite desktop. (Eclipse™ is an open source community committed to a universal development platform).
- IT can provide user-facing components that leverage their existing systems.
- Drag-n-drop assembly and loose coupling of components supports reuse and faster application delivery.
Please refer to the following article posted in IBM's Composite Application blog in order to read more about development benefits:
Benefits from a technical viewpoint
Example
As an example, let's examine composite applications used at the ZetaBank Call Center. These example composite applications support the primary objectives of inbound and outbound banking call centers:
(1) answering the inbound caller's primary request on the initial call,
(2) cross selling and up selling products or services not already consumed by the caller on inbound calls,
and (3) progressing product inquiries through the sales cycle.
The composite applications present information from multiple banking systems in one unified view, and provide a bridge between those systems, to streamline the call center processes and achieve higher levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty.
As composite applications are role-based, the inbound and outbound call center specialists are presented only with the options and components appropriate to their specific roles.
Summary
By weaving together composite applications, employees work faster, and smarter. Customers are happier. And businesses gain a competitive advantage.
One IBM composite application customer has seen time savings of over 85% for an internal process where multiple systems are aggregated in a single customized view. In this example, the customer reduced the time it took to process a help desk ticket from 6 minutes to 40 seconds.