This past Thursday, iRise kicked off the 2009 User Group meeting series at the Bryant Park hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Mitch Bishop, iRise CMO, set the tone for the meeting by asking everyone to stand and do 10 jumping jacks. After catching their breath, the more than 50 users spent an energetic day sharing best practices and getting a sneak preview of the upcoming release of iRise 8, due out in the first quarter of 2010. Here’s a brief summary of the day…

Emmet B. Keeffe III, iRise CEO, welcomed the attendees and shared his definition of the “Enterprise Visualization” market:

1. Fully dynamic visualization of software applications
2. True platform model, including collaboration and shared content
3. Downstream integration – IBM Rational is the first, others (e.g. HP Mercury) are coming
4. Transformation services, including change management, training and support to embrace a new way of developing software

Emmet acknowledged that the full potential of “enterprise visualization” requires a transformation of people, process and technology that depends on strong leadership from the CIO’s office. He shared some examples of successful transformations, including BP, FedEx, JPMC and UPS – with UPS “setting the record” for rapid transformation to visualization in just four months.

Following Emmet, Dennis O’Leary, Managing Partner at Encore Financial Partners, took the podium to give his view of the “The Road Ahead”. Dennis sees a lot of bumps in the economic road ahead. In fact, he believes that recovery – getting back to where we were – is not possible. Decades of consumer excess, and now government excess, are creating a massive deficit and building a mountain of foreign debt.

IT implications –budgets will continue to be tight, so you have to be selective – focus on the strategic stuff and plug the biggest budget leaks. During his days at JPMC, Dennis developed a rule of 2’s – every project will cost twice as much and take twice as long to develop and will deliver half the expected results. He found the biggest “leakage” was in defining software requirements. Dennis is a big believer that visualization tools like iRise are a great way to avoid budget overruns.

Next on the agenda were three iRise users who shared their stories of introducing visualization into the software development life cycle. Monica Longmire explained how JPMorgan Chase is using visualization to enhance usability on applications that are used by over 200,000 JPMC employees around the world. Key to the success at JPMC is the development of an Interaction Pattern Library – a set of re-usable components that are shared through the iRise Definition Center. Non-technical Business Analysts can check out components from the library, saving them time and helping reinforce corporate interface standards.

Next up: Martin Brunk, Senior Manager for product development at E*TRADE FINANCIAL, talked about his experiences using visualization to help E*TRADE transition its applications to a SAAS model. Martin explained that, before iRise, E*TRADE ran three or four times over budget on software projects. But, their first iRise project, a customer-facing web application, came in on-time and on-budget. As an extra bonus, just five months into the project, E*TRADE gave a public demo of the application using Martin’s iRise visualization.

The last customer case study came from Keri Jones, a human factors engineer at a large financial institution. Keri’s company uses a blended agile-waterfall methodology that is based on four-week sprints. Keri says she used iRise to increase their agility – reviewing requirements, finding missed requirements and making changes much more quickly. They used to use Photoshop and Powerpoint, but Keri says it is much quicker and easier with iRise.

After the case studies, the topic turned to the future plans for iRise software. Pete Indelicato, Senior Product Manager at iRise, gave an overview of iRise 8 and demonstrated some of the new features. iRise has been beta testing the new release over the past few months and expects the release to be available in Q1 of 2010. Customers interested in being a part of the beta test program can send an email to beta@irise.com.

Toby Thornton, Associate Director of Enterprise Solutions for iRise, challenged the audience to question traditional thinking and find creative ways to use iRise visualizations. Toby suggested using visualizations for training and usability testing, to get funding for a project, or to kill bad projects early. The full-day agenda wrapped up with an interactive user panel and lots of discussion about ways to encourage adoption of visualization within each attendee’s company.

Want more details from the NY User Group meeting? Video from selected sessions will be available on the iRise site in the coming weeks. The User Group series continues throughout October, next stop: Atlanta. Click here for more information on meeting locations and dates.