Blue 2.0 blueprints* – mobile

In the age of everyone on the go, advancements in internet scalability, browser technology and hand-held devices in the past few years have dramatically changed the way we use the web. While these changes initially made an impact on end-consumer type of products, they have been slowly, but surely, impacting the business world as well. More businesses are demanding a new level of user experience where the user can do things online faster and easier than what they could do with a service rep on the phone a few years ago. While the BPM stack is always needed to provide solid service orchestration and process enablement, designing a proper REST tier and web application layer can be used to significantly enhance the usability and reusability of applications, whether they are customer-facing, back-office, B2B, etc.

Skills:

  1. REST architecture design and implementation: RESTful service have become the “web’s protocol” for exposing services. It is how Amazon exposes their renowned cloud services, how youtube feeds its video lists to other sites, and so on. In business, REST has become a way for businesses to talk to each other regardless of the underlying implementation of their services. Since REST is a common web standard, virtually every browser, smartphone and tablet in the market supports it. REST can be used alongside current SOA and BPM technology to expose services and expand into the handheld market and modern browsers.
  2. Rich Internet Applications (RIAs): RIAs turn your web experience from viewing static pages to using interactive applications. Taking advantage of numerous advancements in browser technology, a user can interactively work on their taxes, get an insurance quote, collaborate and share with teammates, etc. Since this is mostly happening on the web client side, these applications scale much more efficiently, thus serving a wider audience with less expensive server resources. The result is a significantly more engaging user experience and added scalability as explained.
  3. Mobile development: Mobile development has been a hot trend in the last year. This includes smartphones as well as tablets, and comes in the forms of mobile web development (i.e. versions of RIAs specifically targeted for the mobile phone) and phone applications deployed in app stores. Development of such apps uses open web standards such as HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript and takes into account the “on-the-go” type of user. Hybrid apps are a special form of applications that use the above mentioned open web standards to expose phone features such as GPS, camera, real-time notifications, etc. They can be written for all major mobile OSs such as Apple iOS, Blackberry, Android, WebOS, etc. Since hybrid apps use open web standards and avoid native phone languages, the same code stream can be used for all phone brands as opposed to maintaining separate development and testing for each brand, thus introducing major cost savings.
  4. User experience design: Having been on numerous customer-facing web projects, I have spent hundreds of hours with design and UX teams to refine user interfaces and perfect things such as web flow, ergonomics and application usability. Having these skills in addition to solid technical knowledge is essential for building a great user experience