Happy Holidays

You’re an iRise aficionado, with more modeling hours under your belt than Santa has trips around the world. Now is your chance to prove how much you know about iRise Studio by taking the iRise Explained Knowledge Assessment. This multiple-choice/point-and-click online assessment was developed as part of the iRise Explained e-learning course, and can be accessed from the iRise Explained course launch page. There is no risk in taking the assessment (other than a blow to your ego), since scores are not tracked. You will, however, get the chance to review your results and see which questions you answered incorrectly. So go ahead, show us what you’ve got!

iRise Education Services is pleased to announce the availability of three new e-learning courses, all freely available for on-demand access.  Please see the press release for more information, or go directly to the e-Learning Course page on iRise.com.

Capgemini CTO Carl Bate wrote a very interesting post on December 9th about the 40 year anniversary of the invention of the computer mouse by a true visionary; Doug Engelbart. 

Can it really be 40 years already?  We’ve seen so many incredible technologies come (and go!) in that time.  As futurist, author and musical genius Ray Kurzweil often writes, we are experiencing the ‘law of the exponential’ in all things technological.  We are on an inexorable path towards the merging of biology and technology - exciting times indeed.

Human-computer interaction has progressed in giant leaps since the early days of card readers, punch tape and block mode mainframe terminals (yes, we used to call them “CRTs”).   Yet as these interfaces get more complex, we need a better way to visualize and communicate earlier in the design process.   Carl said it best on his post:

“And whatever the physical interface, seeing is believing. So before trying to write the thousand words many times over to describe the experience, a simulation or two supported by technologies such as iRise and a visualisation approach can not only enhance the business outcome but will tend to save 10-25% of full lifecycle development and run costs too.”

Thanks for the endorsement Carl; we couldn’t agree more.

We can’t wait to see what the next 40 years brings!

An important bill designed to prevent endemic waste surrounding federal government IT projects has passed a Senate committee vote. The Information Technology Investment Oversight Enhancement and Waste Prevention Act (S. 3384) would require federal agencies to regularly report to Congress on significant shortfalls in the cost, schedule and performance of their IT programs. The legislation would also encourage better planning and ensure that officials are alerted soon after problems arise. This bill was passed by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on October 1st and now faces a full vote on the floor of the Senate. A separate version of the Bill is also being considered by the House of Representatives.

Among other provisions, the proposed Bill requires projects that are over 40% off schedule or cost estimates to be reported directly to Congressional oversight committees. At that point these distressed projects would have access to a small ’strike force’ of experienced private and public sector IT experts that would focus on areas like earned value management, defining requirements and project management.

The full text of the bill can be found here.

Here’s an interesting article on the subject by Meredith Levinson in CIO.com.

Is this new legislation a good thing? Norm Brown seems to think so. Norm is the executive director for the Center for Program Transformation and his testimony before the same Senate sub-committee seemed to support the view that federal IT projects need all the help they can get:

“Literally billions of taxpayer dollars go down the drain every year in both visible and invisible Information Technology (IT) acquisition waste. IT projects too often experience problems of cost explosions, schedule black-holes, performance disappearances, and large-scale train-wrecks-many caused by violating one or more fundamental laws of “IT” Physics.”

Requirments is clearly one of the root causes for all the waste and we think visualization could go a long way towards solving the problem.

From our perspective, this proposed legislation is a good thing. Although the results of oversight may not be known from some time, one thing is clear: IT projects everywhere are in distress and anything we can do to stop wasting public money can’t be all bad. Especially in this economic climate, it’s time that government started aggressively adopting best practices for project success from the private sector. And visualization is one of those practices.

What’s your point of view?

Author, thought-leader and marketing guru Seth Godin is offering an amazing opportunity for you come work with him for 6 months.  It’s not going to be easy to get though.  You’ll have to convince him that you’re worthy and willing to drop everything to take advantage of it.

Here’s what he’s planning for the six months:

• One hour a day of class/dialogue
• Four hours a day of working on his projects
• Three hours a day of working on your personal project
• Five hours a day of living, noticing, doing and connecting

Here are some key dates:

• Deadline for applications: December 14, 2008
• Open house in his office by invitation only: December 16.
• Start date: January 19, 2009

Read all about it here http://www.squidoo.com/Alternative-MBA

Congratulations to valued customers Anders Jangbrand of CSC, Pete Dowling of UPS, and Ashley Hall, randomly selected from among the many e-learning course evaluation respondents who provided feedback on the iRise e-learning that launched back in August. Our three winners each received a $25 Amazon gift certificate with our compliments. Enjoy!

Customer feedback is extremely important to us as we look for ways to improve and expand our current training offerings (in fact, look for an announcement next week regarding our newest additions, which were largely the result of customer input). To show our appreciation to those of you who take the time to provide this feedback, we plan to repeat our random drawing each quarter. All you need to do to enter is complete one of our courses, and then follow the link to the online evaluation on the course launch page. You will be entered once for each course you evaluate. Happy learning!

 At the recent InformationWeek 500 conference, Alexander Wolfe caught up with iRise co-founder Emmet Keeffe. The chat revolved around visualization and how it helps business people make decisions before costly development begins. Check it out…

I hear from a lot of customers that find visualization a bit overwhelming at first.  It’s a new way to explore business needs and hear directly from your stakeholders and customers before costly development begins.  iRise is the market leader in visualization.  Over 200 customers have improved their processes by visualizing their needs.

So to help you begin your first journey, I’ve decided to put together a getting starting guide for you.

1. (5min) Browse the iRise Product Overview Video.  Take a quick look at visualization and how it can benefit you.  There are plenty of customer testimonials and product videos in the Media center if you are interested.
2. (15min) Take the iRise Product Tour.  Explore how iRise can help you based on your role in the company.
3. (15min) Download iRise. iRise offers a free fully-functioning 30 day trial of the iRise Professional Edition product.  Individual business analysts, interface designers and project managers can leverage powerful visualization techniques already in use by hundreds of corporate customers to get business critical software projects to market faster, with less cost and risk.
4. (4+hrs) Take the iRise eLearning courses. iRise helps get you started with 2 free eLearning courses.  iRise Overview, a self-paced, eLearning course designed to introduce iRise to anyone responsible for selecting and/or using iRise on a project and iRise Explained, a self-paced, eLearning course that covers an introduction to the basic capabilities of iRise and how to use such capabilities to elicit and validate requirements and designs for page flow, page layout, navigation, data, business logic, high fidelity user interfaces and dynamic user interaction using actions, events, alternate views, styles, templates and masters..
5. (5min) Download the Common Samples iDoc.  This iDoc can be opened in your trial version of iRise and gives you a number of useful visualization examples. Copy and paste what you need into your new project. Want to see how high definition, data driven visualizations are done? Use the Common Samples iDoc as a guide. Speed up learning and get your next project kicked off fast.

That’s it, you’ve developed a high level understanding of iRise and visualization.  Now you have 29 days left on your trial, get visualizing!

The September iRise Web Seminar September 18th discusses iRise for SAP is the world’s only solution for visualizing and fully experiencing extensions to SAP before coding:

iRise September Web Seminar - Thursday September 18th at 10am PDT/1pm EDT

iRise for SAP

Using actual customer case studies this free Web seminar will cover:

More companies bet their business on SAP than any other application solution. At the beginning of many SAP projects, the initial goal is to implement SAP “out of the box” in order to avoid costly extensions. Inevitably, gaps emerge during the blueprint phase of these projects and SAP must be extended in order to meet the needs of the business. Documenting business needs with text, use cases and static screen shots often leads to delay and cost overruns.

iRise for SAP is the world’s only solution for visualizing and fully experiencing extensions to SAP before coding, which cuts project cost, accelerates delivery and takes the risk out of global sourcing for getting mission-critical SAP applications delivered.

Don’t miss this valuable online web seminar sponsored by iRise.

Register Now

And here is some background information on our speaker:

Emmet B. Keeffe III is the Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder of iRise. Over the last 15 years, Emmet has applied his philosophy of “the network is the business” to become one of the most well-connected CEOs in the software industry. As CEO of iRise, Emmet has leveraged his network to close over $50M in investment funding and is also intimately involved with sales, marketing and business development at iRise.

Register Now