The Future of the Enterprise User Interface | AMR Research

The Future of the Enterprise User Interface | AMR Research

Application Infrastructure

The New UI

The user interface (UI) will evolve into a pervasive layer for user interaction in the next five years, extending established enterprise systems to users in their work environments—wherever they happen to be. The new UI will also serve as the platform for enterprises to deploy and tie together an emerging array of personal, group, and community productivity and collaboration tools.

While the new UI won’t be a simple, thin facade, it will seem simple to end users, insulating them from the complexity of numerous internal and external applications. As such, it will no longer be trivialized as eye candy by IT developers. Instead it will be an intrinsic part of every company’s software architecture. It will allow end users a persistent, consistent, and personalized means of accessing, contributing, and delivering information across internal and external sources; structured and unstructured systems; and business, personal, and community services. By allowing people and communities to engage in new ways, the new UI will be the crucial mechanism for ensuring their ideas, expertise, and knowledge contribute more directly to enterprise performance.

Enterprises should lay out their own five-year vision for the new UI in the context of their business, with a view toward the business opportunities and advantages it could bring. They should match their vision with their strategic vendors’ abilities or willingness to achieve it. Portal frameworks are rightly the method most are using today. Large infrastructure, software, and suite providers must recognize that resistance to interoperability will increasingly hinder their ability to grow. This may not be immediately obvious when selling individual applications, but long-term sales may suffer as a result of customer frustration and lack of seamless interoperability. Vendors focused on specific business processes or industries can maximize the opportunity by adopting portal standards, componentizing applications, and providing rich visual components to demonstrate their ability to reach many environments. Those in the knowledge management space, including collaboration platforms, search, content management, and emerging social networking (such as Web 2.0-style applications), should position themselves to address new UI demands. And service providers should make the effort to understand the evolving demands for the new UI and extend their expertise commensurately in designing an engaging user experience. They should gear their technology and process expertise toward overcoming technical, organizational, and cultural obstacles, as companies look eagerly toward more pervasive approaches to ubiquitous computing and unified communications and collaboration.

For more details on where user interfaces are headed see, “The Future of the Enterprise User Interface,” and its companion pieces, “New Technology Trends for the New User Interface” and “The New UI: Prime Software Players To Watch.”