We’ve worked with a lot of online marketing and e-business teams at Global 2000 companies, and a commonly heard frustration is that IT is slowing down online innovations due to resource constraints and conflicting priorities

Marketing wants to go live quickly, run a lot of tests and make frequent updates, all to optimize conversion or tweak the user experience. IT wants to make sure systems are running smoothly, are maintainable and cost effective.

Does it really have to be so painful? No, we don’t think so. We’ve seen with several ways to ease the tension between e-business and IT, so both can meet their goals.

Background

First a little bit of background: we’ve implemented Rich Internet Applications at dozens of Global 2000 companies, usually to optimize online conversion, increase customer retention and cross-selling, or to improve the user experience in general. We usually get the order from the e-business department and work with IT for the implementation. We use the following strategies to speed up projects:

1: Leverage the Content Management System

A lot of changes to your website can be done from the CMS, even changes to interactive items such as forms, calculators, products finders, and self-service dashboards. The great thing about Rich Internet Applications is that they essentially are made up of web pages, so there is usually no need to install anything on the web server. And publishing something via the CMS is much faster than having to go through IT. And IT is fine with this, because it follows established web publishing procedures.

2: Use Loosely Coupled Links to Back-end Applications

Often Rich Internet Applications need to interact with information on the web server or a back-end system. The IT department needs to make these connections, and that may take some time. However, if IT can expose the application as a Web Service, the RIA can be changed in any possible way while still talking to the same Web Service. There are also specialized vendors that turn existing applications into a Web Service. Once the Web Service is done, you can use strategy 1 to make changes as often as you want.

In other cases the performance of back-end systems is disappointing. This can be solved with a nightly publish from the back-end system, rather than connecting in real-time. We’ve done this for zip-code checks for both DSL lines, as well as certain financial products: that type of information does not change more often than once a day. Obviously, this is not a suitable approach for real-time information.

3: Host Externally

If option 1 and 2 don’t work, you can also host the application externally, and link to it from your website. In most cases, this is only possible if you don’t need a link to internal applications. In addition to linking to a page on an external web server, you can also embed external components within your own website, just like you can load external widgets in Facebook or iGoogle, and it will look totally integrated.

We’ve found that e-business projects tend to be faster and more successful when using the above strategies. We hope you find it useful. Please let us know if this has worked for you, and if you know other ways to facilitate the cooperation between Marketing and IT. Just leave a comment below.