The iRise Blog

We announced the immediate availability of the iRise simulation template for the iPhone at the Interop and Software 2008 conferences yesterday.

“iRise for iPhone”™ gives business analysts, user experience (UX) professionals and others a way to quickly prototype the look, feel and behavior of iPhone applications by making available pre-defined visualization widgets and templates that can be quickly assembled into a high definition mobile applications. 

The template can simulate all of the iPhone’s standard menu icons and user actions, such as using sliders and zooming in and out of screens by “pinching” and “unpinching.” Application designers can use it to create custom buttons, manipulate the menu icons and define the effects of actions such as double-tapping a button.

Our alliance partner, OneSpring, developed the capability and is also providing the “OneSpring iPhone SimDK for iRise”. 

Chuck Converse, a senior user experience architect at OneSpring noted, “Most applications, if you design them for mobile devices, are very text-heavy.  The iPhone’s display capabilities give designers more freedom and a whole new set of choices.”

The full story is available from these related links:

• iRise iPhone press release
• Article from CIO.com and INTEROP

And here is the YouTube video produced by OneSpring which demos the iRise iPhone capability:

�

Share This

What are Rich Internet Applications or RIAs? Are they the panacea for everything that ails us? Are they the perfect vehicle for sexy, splashy sites? Do RIAs provide a better user experience?

Learn more about RIAs from User Experience expert Laurie Gray of OneSpring in this month’s Catalyze Community Webcast. Laurie will discuss some of the most common attitudes toward RIA’s and address the 5 biggest myths surrounding this exciting technology. 

• Title - The Five Myths of RIAs featuring Laurie Gray 
• Date and Time — Tuesday, March 18 at 11am Pacific/2pm Eastern
• Registration — Sign up at this link
• Recording – If you miss the live broadcast, the recording and presentation will be posted in Catalyze by March 20

Laurie has lived in the world of user experience since 1995 and  is a user experience expert with OneSpring - one of iRise’s strategic partners and 2007 Partner of the Year.  She also wrote an article on Best Practices in User Experience last year.

Share This

Project risk is keeping federal computer analysts (aka “business analysts” in the private sector) up at night. InformationWeek recently reported on some statistics by the U.S. Office of Management & Budget (OMB) where CIO Karen Evans was quoted as saying “there are 585 projects valued at $27B on the ‘management watch list,’ although some of those have also been deemed high risk. Projects can be deemed high risk for a variety of reasons, including being high-cost, highly complex, or high profile.” Typically project failure results in rework which we define as being a result of any, or all, of these factors:

• IT built a different project than the agency envisioned
• the application has missing features
• citizens or government employees won’t adopt it because it’s too hard to use

Mastering the customer experience is probably one of the single biggest playbook pages the government is now borrowing from private industry. It’s moving towards making agency sites as easy-to-use as highly trafficked consumer information and e-commerce sites such as Amazon, Travelocity and eBay. Adopting a customer-centric practice in application development means that crucial stakeholder buy-in happens up front, in the design phase of the project. It also means that usability testing happens before the application is built and with real end users.

Federal industry expert Steve Meltzer, president of Meltzer & Associates and former director of the General Services Administration’s (GSA) Federal Computer Acquisition Center captured the government’s new priorities in IT purchasing and development:

“The public sector does not buy IT for IT’s sake, but rather is driven by advancing the President’s priorities and providing citizens with easy accessibility to information.”

Today, we announced our entry into the federal market, led by Dean Terry with Spectrum Systems as our reseller. iRise helps to increase the success rates for federal IT projects because stakeholders – including the employees in the trenches – have the opportunity to test drive the application before it’s built. The release on our third round of funding, also issued today, referenced expansion into new markets and our entrance into the public sector signals the first example of that.

Learn more about iRise’s solution for the federal market by visiting this industry-specific page.

Share This

Global sourcing is delivering expected cost savings in most cases, according to a recent study done by Deloitte Consulting, covered here in an InformationWeek article. Of the 300 companies surveyed, 70% were satisfied with their sourcing relationships, with 83% reporting an average ROI of 25%. But only one in three executives that participated claimed they are gaining important benefits from innovation or transformational ideas from these relationships.

I would suggest that visualization has to be THE most critical weapon of choice as companies move their global sourcing strategies to the next level. That becomes painfully clear in the survey when IT executives complained about “underestimating the project’s scope, higher-than-expected costs, and poor-quality communications, service, and reporting from their service providers” as the main reasons they drop their services partners. If you’re contemplating moving your global sourcing partnerships from maintenance and support functions to take on new application development, then communication is critical. Visualizing the final product ahead of time with something that all global stakeholders can fully experience can only help drive closer communication, better estimates, faster turn-around and lower risk to the project.

Visualization (in the form of CAD & 3D Modeling tools) has helped traditional manufacturing organizations build better cars, airplanes, computers, etc. in a global sourcing model. Time to market has been cut in half, with better quality products built in a fraction of the cost. It’s time that software catches up!

Share This

We’ve just launched the first in a series of podcasts. After listening to feedback from customers, partners and even our own sales staff, we’ve been able to generate a slate of issues that have become the editorial calendar for the show’s programming. In each episode, we’ll dive deep into the topic with an iRise executive, customer or partner in our extended ecosystem. The show is hosted by David Spark, technology journalist and founder of Spark Media Solutions. In this first podcast entitled, “How iRise Works with SAP,” Spark talks with Sherrick Murdoff, iRise’s VP of Business Development and Global Alliances.

Read the Transcript Download the MP3

• The business process behind using iRise to simulate custom SAP and other packaged applications (also see posts Top 10 IT Predictions (#2) and iRise Simulates SAP)
• Why visualizing your packaged application (e.g SAP CRM) in iRise takes 1/3 the time of existing prototyping tools
• How global systems integrators (e.g. Capgemini) leverage iRise for custom installations in specific verticals (e.g. finance, health care)

We also have a brief position paper on the topic which can be found here.

Subscribe to the podcast now to receive future episodes directly to your iPod or MP3 player.

We’ll be announcing more of these podcasts in coming months and in the meantime, if there’s a topic you feel we could shed some light on, drop me a line at carlas (at) irise.com.

Share This

This month iRise announced a partnership with Advanced Concepts Center (ACC), a consulting and learning solutions company. ACC offers technology education services to business analysts to improve employee productivity. We’re excited about this collaboration as it’s another step in normalizing visualization software as a global standard for companies building business applications. This partnership is, in part, a response to the  evolving role of the business analyst (BA) in successfully communicating business initiatives.

In this new order where usability is king, the disconnect between business and IT is no longer acceptable.  For many companies, the answer to this eternal question is the savvy business analyst; that rare bird who is both business- and technical-minded.  According to Gartner Research there are 600,000 business analysts in the U.S.  Like it or not, the BA is fast becoming a linchpin for which the success of business initiatives hinge.  For iRise, training BAs on our visualization software is a natural fit.  With ACC on board, the business analyst has even more training options available.  We welcome them into our growing cadre of regional partners.

Share This

Tata Consultancy Services (an iRise Alliance Partner) released the results of their first annual global IT survey recently.  The biggest surprise was that business managers responded that they tend to accept IT problems as a norm and necessary evil. Would you?

Some of the survey highlights include:

• 62% had IT projects that failed to meet their schedules
• 49% suffered from budget overruns
• 47% had higher than expected maintenance costs
• 41% failed to deliver the expected business value and ROI

An interesting question looked at the reaction of business managers and the Board of Directors when IT projects have gone wrong:

The two noticeable differences between the US and Global results were that US Business Managers rarely look for an IT scapegoat and that they are less apt to accept problems as norm and necessary evil.  They are also more likely to continue to provide support to improve IT for the business.

Personally, I find the results troubling and like to see some organizations challenging the norm with new and innovative ideas. Some choose visualization as a critical element of communication to prevent these failures. See some examples here.

TCS is working with iRise to mitigate risks on IT projects. As Vipul Shah, Manager R&D at TCS, put it, “Software development is an inherently complex process faced with the risks of miscommunication and the potential loss of control.  iRise helps TCS mitigate these risks by visually simulating and validating requirements before development even begins. This strengthens the scope of our engagements and ensures the solutions and services we deliver to our clients are exactly as intended.”

The survey was conducted among 800 global mid-level and senior IT staff (23% of them from the US).  You can read more about the survey and download detailed results from this link.

Share This

I really enjoy seeing companies you work with almost every day
(in my case, alliance partners), take a leadership position to embrace
what you have been evangelizing to the market. Last month, Capgemini announced the launch of the Rapid Design & Visualization (RDV) Lab. Though the Lab is now available nationwide through all their Accelerated Solutions Environments (ASEs), the RDV Lab has been in place for several year and iRise has been actively working with and a primary solution in the practice with many joint customers. The announcement was made at SOA World, an appropriate place since visualization is critical to understanding what business stakeholders want that can be enabled in a SOA environment (but more on that in a later post…).

The RDV Lab continues to expand Capgemini’s work in the field of simulation by using a methodology that combines the latest simulation and communication tools with new research on how people create complex software. Capgemini estimates that 60 percent of such programs – including ERP (SAP, Oracle, etc.), Web 2.0 and SOA initiatives – encounter rework following misunderstandings between project managers who write the specifications, and the engineers who build the programs.  The announcement states, “The RDV is designed to help all parties get the software right the first time” - sound familiar? Absolutely, because Capgemini and iRise both believe that people, process and technology are required to really bring the full benefits of getting software right the first time.

Corey Glickman, the national leader for the Capgemini RDV Lab,
has been a champion for simulation and visualization for years
and an iRise user, speaking on different aspects at iRise User Conferences and interviews. Corey recently stated, “The RDV lets designers substitute images for nouns, animation for verbs, and a full–blown simulation for a phone book of instructions.” Is visualization really is the new language for designing software? I think Corey hit it right on the mark.

Capgemini has really taken the lead among global system integrators in piloting this effort years ago and now launching capabilities nationwide. For example, last year I presented Capgemini with the iRise Alliance Advantage Partner of the Year award for its substantial work (among other things) with one of our large manufacturing customers. Though the market for simulation is still young and in the evangelism stage, with the help of Capgemini, more companies will experience the benefits of visualization and share their success.

I look forward to sharing more examples of iRise alliance partners adopting the new language for designing software.

Share This

iRise has expanded its use into the area of packaged applications that include SAP, Oracle, Siebel, PeopleSoft and many other package applications.

I recently presented the value of simulating iRise for SAP along with Melanie Lucas, iRise Enterprise Solutions Manager at the 2007 Partner Summit, pre-cursor to the iRise Fusion 07 User Conference. Its important to recognize the value of simulation beyond custom applications and how similar benefits are achievable with packaged applications like SAP.

Validating requirements for SAP projects is never easy. Packaged software implementations suffer the same poor requirements challenges that custom applications do, the difference is much of the package is already defined. SAP tools exist to prototype SAP applications; however, the SAP tools are cumbersome to rapidly create and iterate with stakeholders and many implementations today are heavily customized and/or heavily integrated, making it very difficult to adapt the SAP tools to vizualize truly what the business has in mind.

Using iRise, Melanie showed how a business analyst can rapidly simulate the SAP screens, data and logic in order to validate requirements quickly and iterate often with stakeholders and IT in order to define the application and get alignment on the end-state. The iDoc is available on Catalyze to iRise customers & partners. Melanie gave examples of what SAP implementations benefit most from simulation:

• SAP CRM - typically involves heavy customization and multiple interfaces to other customer systems
• SAP SCM / Procurement - typically involves heavy customization, often a supplier portal, and integration to back office systems
• SAP HR Portal - HR systems benefit from heavy user validation and review
• Composite Applications using NetWeaver - SAP’s custom development platform, NetWeaver, is being used to create new, custom, “composite” applications that leverage existing SAP modules

Simulating the SAP system provides a way to rapidly assemble a working, functional prototype that can be reviewed and experienced (literally) by stakeholders and IT, with rapid, easy iterations on the prototype to quickly extract and validate the right requirements. Key stakeholders, end-users, analysts and SAP developers can all agree on the right model and requirements ahead of configuring, customizing, developing or integrating the live SAP system. During the presentation, I highlighted some of the benefits from simulating an SAP system:

• Requirements are validated before development/configuration starts
• Rework and mid-stream requirements changes are significantly reduced (by up to 70%)
• SAP simulations (masters, templates, models) can be re-used for greater efficiency in later projects
• Adoption of the system rollout is significantly higher, due to involving and confirming with more stakeholders and end-users upfront

A majority of simulations for SAP have been done by our alliance partners like Capgemini, Accenture and Deloitte - especially since they have the deep SAP expertise. Capgemini, for example, has gone much further and simulated many different SAP modules like CRM, Service Management, Call Center, HR, Supply Chain, etc. - creating an extensive asset library that they can offer to clients as a means to better validate client requirements and a jumpstart to getting started with the SAP blueprint phase. Its proven successful at many clients and demonstrates their deep expertise with SAP.

I am always interested to hear about more simulations involving packaged applications, including SAP.

Share This

At this year’s 2007 iRise Partner Summit in Las Vegas, pre-cursor to the Fusion 07 User Conference, iRise proudly awarded OneSpring the 2007 Partner of the Year! I gave out the award along with Emmet B. Keeffe, CEO & Co-Founder, during the Partner Summit Reception on Wednesday night (photo here). The award recognizes OneSpring for an outstanding year in helping to introduce iRise and the benefits of simulation to several large customers while providing application definition consulting services to assist companies in achieving the these benefits.

OneSpring was started just 2 years ago by two innovative people, Scott McDowell and Jason Moccia, on the foundation of doing application definition better than anyone else. OneSpring started out as an Select level in the iRise Alliance Advantage program  and has grown significantly and advanced in the program every year, reaching the highest alliance level (Strategic) this year. OneSpring has worked with many F500 iRise customers, including Delta, Intercontinental Hotels and Sprint and has adopted iRise as its primary solution for defining business applications. I have found that OneSpring has made a name for itself within the iRise community through sponsoring and speaking at both the 2006 and 2007 user conferences (see OneSpring presentation here) and maintaining the first ever iRise Blog at www.iriseonline.com.

Summary of all the 2007 iRise Alliance Advantage Partner Awards:

• Partner of the Year:  OneSpring
• Partner Pipeline Development Award:  Deloitte
• Partner Marketing Award:  IBM Rational 
• Partner Enablement Award:  Xede Consulting

Please join me in congratulating our 2007 Partner Award winners!

Share This