Platform for Rapid Development & Deployment of Web-based Business Applications

Many organisations are facing the increasing complexity of the products and services being offered to customers, the rapid pace of change of these products and services, changes in compliance and regulations and the expansion of the customer contact channels. As a result, organisations are facing the conflicting requirements of delivering customer satisfaction, increasing revenue from customers whilst reducing overall customer service costs. Organisations are also finding it costly and time consuming to launch new products or service or upgrade existing products and services.

The key to addressing the above problems is the development of applications to automate the sales, support and other customer interaction functions. To be effective such automated applications should:

Have a Web Browser interface. As well as being very cost effective software, this architecture will address the multiple customer contact channels requirement. A web broswer interface can make the automated application available to internal agents, external partners and resellers and directly to customers thereby ensuring accessability and consistency.
Be developed using a platform for rapid application development. The tradional application development model whereby the business departments specify the application requirements and the IT department develops the application cannot address the requirements to launch and upgrade products and services speedily. What is needed is software platform that enables collaboration between the business and IT functions to develop, maintain and deploy web applications rapidly.

There are many classes of customer facing applications that can be automated and delivered with a web Browser interface. These include:

Generating quotations for personal or commercial insurance products.
Guided selling to match customer needs for configurable products and services and the generation of quotations and proposals.
Enforcing regulatory compliance e.g. health & safety, money laudering, sex discrimantion, building planning regulations.
Automating internal policies and procedures e.g. cross-selling, customer retention, and complaint handling.
Credit and insurance applications and claims processing.
Problem diagnostic, trouble-shooting and resolution.
On-line advisory systems e.g. entitlement to social benefits, taxation, environmental, engineering.

Some web based customer facing applications are stand-alone applications while others are web front-ends to one or more back office business applications and data sources.