Traditional application development processes make it challenging to meet the time and budget constraints facing businesses today. Going from the requirements gathering phase to writing up design documents to delivering applications can take many months-which is often too long for executives wanting to address new market opportunities or solve old business problems.

The need to shorten application development cycles is familiar to programmers. Yet, several systems and business requirements in place today seem to conspire against it. Corporate applications and data residing in departmental silos, threats to information inside and outside an organization, and demands for more integrated, dynamic user interfaces are just a few of the issues that can drain development resources and slow application rollout.

Rapid development of complex applications
As a performance improvement solutions developer serving health care companies nationwide, bConnected develops intranet- and Internet-based solutions that deliver accurate, real-time information to empower managers to change an organization's behavior, processes, and performance. The flexible solutions overcome organizational silos and give managers accurate views into many facets of their businesses. Integral to our success has been the ability to cost-effectively develop complex solutions in as little as six weeks-from initial client meetings to full deployment.

The streamlined development relies on industry standards such as Java and Adobe Flex. Using the open solutions enables us to address business demand for intuitive front-end processes fully integrated with enterprise systems. Our rapid development environment centers around a toolset with three in-house-created components: Link Vision, Link Design, and Link Execution.

Built upon Adobe Flex, Link Vision is a user interface design tool for creating intuitive business intelligence dashboards and report cards. Link Design is a Java desktop application that acts as a process design tool, enabling us to visually program data collection, translation, and presentation. The third tool, Link Execution, runs in a J2EE-certifed application server and is the execution engine for performing actions outlined in Link Design. Our solutions support multiple application servers and services, as well as databases from small MySQL systems all the way up to enterprise Oracle systems.

Focus on customer problems, not browser incompatibilities
bConnected's work in the health care industry is indicative of many of the challenges that developers typically face. The industry is slow to adopt technology, and professionals frequently rely on manual processes. As a result, solutions have to be easy to implement and manage, and particularly easy to use. Otherwise, staff will resort to familiar manual processes.

In addition, health care organizations often have information scattered throughout the enterprise. Operational data, patient care information, financial records, and other critical data lives in spreadsheets, Microsoft Access databases, and dozens of other systems large and small. With the help of Adobe Flex and our Link Design tool, we can quickly create intuitive business intelligence dashboards that securely aggregate and present any detail managers require. The dashboard can reach into databases, pull information from file systems, and interpret data on spreadsheets.

Significant from a developer perspective is the speed in which we can accomplish this. Because we are not writing individual lines of code for user interfaces and integration points, dynamic dashboards can be created in days. An added advantage is that Flex overcomes a major obstacle facing developers-getting web applications to run reliably in any browser.

Typically, the only way developers streamlined creating sophisticated HTML applications was to target a specific browser platform and version, so that it was possible to gauge an application's behavior. Unfortunately, this approach to development does not reflect the reality of how individuals and businesses work, with end users relying on a wide range of browsers.

With Flex, we are not concerned about whether a person is running our application in Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 or version 6.0, Firefox, or any other browser. Because the Flex application runs on the Adobe Flash player-already installed on more than 98 percent of Internet-connected computers-we know that our interfaces will behave in the same way regardless of the browser. It is an important feature that can eliminate a week or longer from development and help ensure applications reach as wide an audience as possible.

By developing in Flex, our team stays focused on solving customer problems, not browser problems. Rich, interactive applications can be deployed on the free Flash Player, without requiring users to wait for special downloads, time-consuming page refreshes, or separate applications to launch.

Keeping clients engaged and satisfaction high
Equally important for enhancing development is becoming better able to respond to changing customer requirements, especially in the design stage. A benefit of using Adobe Flex is that we can mock up UI screens quickly in hard code data, without having to fully develop data services. This has improved development processes, as well as customer satisfaction.

We can now take a more iterative approach to design, providing clients with interfaces to evaluate throughout a project. The ongoing communication helps ensure that all parties are engaged in the process. And in the end, clients get exactly what they want. Development reviews can be done as often as weekly, giving clients the opportunity to evaluate the look and feel of an interface, explore drill-down capabilities, and determine the best ways to present information.

For example, if one of our clients wants to evaluate medical services received by patient populations, we can use Flex capabilities within our Link Vision tool to create a display container-pie chart, graph, tabular chart, or other form-without writing a single line of code. If the client opts for a pie chart presentation of data, we can develop a portlet, with each slice representing a service category and each slide defined by an XML information feed. To connect the database information to the UI, our Link Design tool is used to create the database query.

A key advantage of using Flex is the ability to easily amend development to meet changing client needs. For instance, if a customer decides to use a column chart instead of a pie chart, all we have to do is remove the pie chart and drag and drop a column chart into the portal container. The same XML stream can be used. We just need to configure what each column should represent. The revisions can be handled in minutes, as opposed to the hours it could take trying to rework lines of HTML code.

Breaking down data silos
Our work with Rotech Healthcare, a leader in providing medical equipment, respiratory equipment and services, and respiratory medications for home use, highlights the advantages of more open, object-oriented development. As the medical industry grows and competition heats up across all areas, health care companies like Rotech are striving to gain more insight into operations to improve patient care and profits.

Rotech's Director of Operations, John Sullivan, describes a problem familiar to many health care companies. "We need to pull data out of legacy systems, dig out from under the paper, and better analyze the metrics we use to drive our business," he says.

Across more than 500 company locations nationwide, Rotech business managers are responsible for overseeing staff, monitoring patient satisfaction, and tracking on-time delivery of medical supplies and patient care. In addition, they must ensure that products and services are billed to Medicare as well as to private insurers in a timely manner in order to get reimbursed.

Traditionally, Rotech used several 'silo'd' legacy systems, requiring managers to constantly toggle among various databases to find information about patient care, procurement, financial performance, and other activities. Important issues monitored daily by managers include items held during the billing process, equipment not yet received into inventory and asset tracking systems, and equipment not yet confirmed as delivered to or picked up from Rotech patients.

Enhanced productivity and user experiences
To address Rotech's challenges, we used our Flex-based Link Vision to develop a business dashboard-an intuitive desktop panel that provides consolidated views of multiples sources of back-end data-for the company's managers nationwide. Using the powerful dashboard, managers can drill down into aggregated information fast, analyzing revenue, patient care, and inventory metrics that help them meet performance and budget goals. Not only have operations improved, but managers also find that they have more time to spend assisting field staff and generating new business.

"The Location Manager Dashboard that bConnected built around Adobe Flex has changed the behavior of our organization," says Mike Dobbs, chief operating officer at Rotech. "Since deploying the Flex-powered dashboard, we've seen a 20 percent reduction in assets waiting to be processed in inventory and asset tracking systems."

Raising performance standards
Performance boosts in Flex 2 further increase the benefits that Rotech and other clients are realizing. The rendering lag time for large data sets displayed in grids has been eliminated and scrolling across data is seamless. Additionally, the new Flex Builder based on the popular Eclipse IDE helps accelerate development by as much as 50 percent and gives us access to an even greater pool of skilled developers.

Our focus is always on building mutually beneficial relationships with clients. Integrating Adobe Flex into our processes goes a long way in supporting that goal by accelerating application development and expanding the capabilities of web systems. For us, that means more growth and better services, while our clients continue to discover how to improve their operations.