SOA or service-oriented architecture is a chronically hot topic - and there are as many opinions about it as there are IT vendors. According to Wikipedia, SOA is “is a computer system’s architectural style for creating and using business processes, packaged as services, throughout their lifecycle. SOA also defines and provisions the IT infrastructure to allow different applications to exchange data and participate in business processes.” And for a more humorous definition of SOA overload, check out Greg the Architect in the “SOA This, SOA That” video from YouTube.
We recently had an interesting internal email discussion on how iRise deals with SOA and I have excerpted the highlights below:
From Sherrick Murdoff, VP of Alliances and Business Development:
“SOA is most often interpreted as back-end plumbing only, but this is not the case. SOA includes the back-end plumbing, but you don’t start with the back-end plumbing and you don’t start with building web services
What many CIOs and industry leaders have learned and are promoting is to start with the customer experience – this should drive your SOA implementation more than anything. iRise lets you visualize the customer experience and iterate with both end-users and IT to gain alignment on what needs to be built that drives the “how”
Visualizing SOA is important to let the customer experience drive the requirements for what infrastructure you need to put in place
iRise aligns well in any SOA discussion and brings the customer back to what is important – visualizing “what” you need before you begin to think about the “how” you want to implement.”
From Matt Smith, Senior Enterprise Solutions Manager
“Most people over-think the relationship between SOA and simulating applications. SOA basically means there is a provider (machine) and a consumer (machine or human) of a service.
The processing of the service is all the back-end wizardry that goes on within the SOA, which iRise doesn’t diagram in the traditional sense of architecture modeling tools, but it does simulate the action.
The line of business manager and end-user don’t care how the SOA actually processes the service request. iRise simulates the important bit from their perspective of application usability.”
From James McWethy, Enterprise Solutions Director
“SOA…three loaded letters. I’ve seen companies spend years talking about defining and implementing an SOA strategy.
Why not simulate the end-user experience that will result from the tiresome SOA planning process to: (1) Verify that the information being delivered via the service (informational or transactional) will be of value to the end user, and (2) simulate a set of components (portlets, widgets, gadgets, web parts, etc.) that will show the end result of a system comprised of multiple services.
iRise Customer Success Story - At Fusion ‘07, the Customer Experience team from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan gave a presentation on how they used iRise to simulate a technical proof of concept for their new member portal. The presentation is available here and can be viewed here.
So, why risk building your SOA infrastructure without using iRise to engaging your end-users? By simulating the end-user experience with iRise first, both business stakeholders and IT will win.
Do you Twitter yet? Do you even know why you should? Do you know what Twitter is?
What is Twitter? According to the Twitter website, ” Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?” . Twitter lets you send 140 character messages that are visible to anyone and the messages can be sent via the web, IM, cell phone SMS text messaging and the Twitter API. Twittering is also referred to as micro-blogging - and most Twits are easier to read and scan because of the 140 character limitation.
Twitter is definitely moving into the mainstream as evidenced by these two recent quotes:
“Twitter is one of the fastest-growing phenomena on the Internet” - New York Times
‘Twitter is on its way to becoming the next killer app” - TIME Magazine
Common Craft put together this short video to explain Twitter:
Why do I care? Sure, people share some mundane things in their life, but the real value of Twitter is gathering a group of people you follow and learning from them. I use Twitter to find great blog posts and other resources that I may have otherwise missed. Many astute companies are now using Twitter from a marketing perspective to listen to what their customers are saying and to promote blog posts, news articles and press releases. For example, CIO.com is active in Twitter as well as the Editor-in-Chief, Abbie Lundberg, and editor/writer Esther Schindler. People have even ‘twittered’ about iRise and there is even a website called Tweetscan where you can search on companies, people and other phrases.
Twitter Resources Here are some other essential Twitter links to check out:
Twitter Pack - see who you should follow sorted by company, topic, geography, industry and profession. For example, there is a list of the key Usability/UX professionals who Twitter.
It does take some upfront investment of time to get started with Twitter and you have to find the right set of people to follow who are not going to waste your time. Here is a copy of my Twitter feed so you can visualize the value for yourself. Scroll down and see who I’m following. You can click on a user name to access a person’s profile on Twitter and start following them.
You can find me on Twitter at @tomhumbarger. I look forward to seeing you in the “twittersphere”.
The iRise Professional Services team has created a tremendous resource that is a must download for all iRise Users. This new iDoc, called the iRise 6 - Common Samples, is comprised of 53 iRise examples covering a wide range of data functionaliy, RIA and advanced interactions. A few of the documented Samples include: accordian panes, alternate views, autopopulation, portlets, table behaviors, data operations, datasheet actions and search.
One happy iRise user who already downloaded the Common Samples iDoc had this to say, “This is one of iRise’s best pro-active customer service moves. So smart. Big props to those who built them in the PS Group.”
The iDoc is provided as a convenience for all users to learn advanced features and improve their knowledge of iRise. The iDoc is available for download from the iRise Users section of the Catalyze Community. You must be sign into the Catalyze Community and have iRise User Permissions to download the iDoc. If you are not yet a member of Catalyze or the iRise Users Communities, you can get more information and register from this link.
Here are the key links to the Common Samples documents in Catalyze.
Each Sample contains a description of the functionality, the degree of difficulty, steps to demonstrate the functionality and steps on how to build the simulation in iRise as noted below:
Enjoy! If you have any comments or questions about the Common Samples iDoc, please use the Common Samples discussion forum in Catalyze. And thank you iRise Professional Services.
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:
I meet with CIOs, application development groups, business analysts and architects all the time. Our initial conversation always goes the same way; I explain what visualization is and why it’s important. Within 60 seconds everyone, and I do mean everyone, GETS it. You can SEE the light bulb go on. Then….I wait for the inevitable question; “If the visualization is an exact replica of the application, why doesn’t iRise simply generate the code?” Without fail, that question is asked in every single meeting.
Actually, it’s a really good question (it must be with so many people asking it). But there are really good answers as to why iRise doesn’t generate code. Let me try to articulate them here.
What code do you generate? That’s a tricky one, since everyone’s architecture and standards are so different. Do you generate Java/XML? .NET? SOA? Which flavors? If you had to worry about getting the code generation right, you’d quickly run out of resources to figure out all the combinations, test them and support the result. This sounds a lot like the old CASE tools strategy in the 1980’s and 1990’s. See how well THAT worked out.
iRise is specifically designed to be easy to use for business analysts, not developers. The problem that iRise solves is getting business needs documented visually. This is a business-facing challenge, not a developer productivity challenge. If you started to worry about code generation in iRise, the product would become too hard to use and understand for business-facing analysts and usability professionals.
Our primary emphasis is on rapid, high fidelity visualization. To put any amount of emphasis on code generation will slow down the ability to visualize the right business needs quickly and rapidly iterate to the right result. You don’t want to be distracted with figuring out ‘what code should I generate’ during this part of the process. The people creating visualizations are the wrong people to be worried about code generation - that’s the job of architects, software designers and developers.
And of course, the flip answer is this: “There’s no button on the side of the flight simulator for the Boeing 787 that generates the airplane!” There MUST be a reason that other industries invest hundreds of millions in simulation technology without having the capability to simply press a button and build the thing. You visualize things before you build them to produce better, safer products more quickly, with lower cost and risk. The same is true with software and iRise visualizations.
It’s important to note that even though iRise doesn’t generate code, most of our customers report a 25% - 50% reduction in application development time due to the fact that proper visualizations virtually eliminate rework and allow downstream organizations like QA, training, documentation and marketing to get a head start on their work.
It’s Business Analyst appreciation month at CIO.com and Forrester - and it’s a great time to be a business analyst as they are definitely a HOT commodity according to a recent research report.
The Forrester report provides a “better understanding of this crucial yet largely undefined role”. One business analyst interviewed for the report said “everyone agrees on the importance of the business analyst role, but few know exactly what it is that business analysts do.”
Schwaber and Karel interviewed 338 business analysts and reviewed more than 29,000 business analyst job descriptions. They conclude that there is not a standard definition and that the roles between business-oriented and IT-oriented analysts is blurring. In fact, they coined a new role called the “Business Technology Analyst” or BT Analyst.
The Forrester report also pointed out several things that smart CIOs and IT managers can do today to prepare for the future:
Look in your own backyard for talent
Look for BT analysts in untapped parts of your business
Emmet Keeffe, iRise CEO and Co-founder, had an opinion piece published this week in SandHill.com. SandHill.com is the premier destination online destination for strategic information on the software business. The site and its newsletters are read by thousands of top software industry executives every week.
Emmet talks about “The Requirement Challenge” and why “Accurate Specs are Key”. He finishes with “The Benefits of Visualization” which I am paraphrasing below:
Business people can fully experience the product and make changes early in the process, saving significant time and downstream costs.
Developers can catch design and functional errors before an application goes into production.
The process can speed through multiple rounds of functional visual edits to quickly reach decisions on business needs and customer experience.
Managers can increase final adoption of system with upfront agreements of the application’s process flow, experience and visual look and feel.
User experience professionals can rapidly iterate proposed designs directly in front of customers, dramatically improving customer experience.
Software sales teams can demo potential products to customers to get feedback before actually developing the application.
The professional service teams can test a potential product for possible needed changes to speed implementation and integration.
Sharing visualizations with global sourcing partners is not only easier but cheaper. Visualizations eliminate confusion with global development teams because everyone is speaking the same language.
Resellers can sell a solution by showing a visualization of what a specific application could do when integrated into the customer’s environment
He wraps up by repeating his vision, “by 2020, all business software will be visualized before its built, just the same way that every car, airplane and semiconductor are visualized today.”
The entire piece is worth a read and can be found at SandHill.com.
I ran across an interesting blog post this week from Chris Woodill on how to be an effective stakeholder. This post intrigued me because it examined the project team/stakeholder relations dynamic from the stakeholder angle rather than the putting all of the onus on the project team. I have summarized some of Chris’ vision of the expected stakeholder roles and his counsel to stakeholders on “how not to drop the ball”.
“Good” stakeholders need to:
Make decisions - making decisions is the stakeholder’s primary responsibility
Approve documents - timely approvals of decisions and documents
Offer opinion and feedback -provide actionable feedback that can be translated into actions, revisions or improvements
Solicit feedback - help explain, sell concepts and capture feedback from the broader community
Support the team externally - evangelize the project, boost team confidence and help get organizational buy-in
Maintain a high bar of expectations - demand excellence from the team
In addition, “good” stakeholders should:
Be prepared for all meetings - take the time to do your homework before all meetings
Make decisions and offer feedback in a timely manner - don’t delay the project by being late
Be nice to the team - don’t bully the team
Articulate requirements clearly - if you are the domain expert, you need to provide clear and complete requirements to the team
Embed themselves into the team as much as possible - refrain from making us and them distinctions
Being a “good” stakeholder can make a massive difference in the success of a project and minimize project risk at the same time.
If you’re on a project team, you may want to forward this to your stakeholder. If you’re a stakeholder, you may want to look in a mirror and ask yourself “am I a good stakeholder?”.
Laurie Gray from OneSpring (an iRise Strategic Partner) shared her thoughts on Rich Internet Applications or RIA during the monthly Catalyze webcast yesterday.
She started out with the RIA “elevator pitch” from Tony MacDonell who writes the InsideRIA blog:
“Rich Internet Applications are software programs that are designed to run above the level of the operating system, and are universally available to you, where ever you may be when you need to use them. You can run them on any computer, in any context. Run them in the web browser, on the desktop, or even on mobile devices as well. Rich Internet Applications offer powerful user interfaces, that allow you to work or play in ways that are familiar, intuitive, and exciting. They leverage the best of the web, without sacrificing the power of the desktop.”
She also shared the origins of the term Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) which first appeared in an essay by Jesse James Garrett from adaptive path in February 2005.
According to Laurie, the five myths of RIA are:
RIAs provide the perfect vehicle for splashy sites
they are also amazing tools for complex, transactional, data-driven sites too
RIAs bring people-centered design to information workspaces
most users will not care how the app was built, but if they have a bad experience, they won’t come back
If you’ve designed websites, you can design RIAs
that’s not necessarily true
It’s just like our software, of course our users will understand it
think again — there are lots of ways to do things
RIAs provide a better user experience than traditional HTML
it depends — and sometimes it can be a worse experience
Laurie wrapped up with a demo of her favorite RIA websites and a list of valuable resources before answering a spirited round of questions.
The presentation slides embedded below and webcast recording are available from the Catalyze Community. Some of the questions from the webcast are also answered in Laurie’s Catalyze blog.
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.
“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.
SOA or service-oriented architecture is a chronically hot topic - and there are as many opinions about it as there are IT vendors. According to Wikipedia, SOA is “is a computer system’s architectural style for creating and using business processes, packaged as services, throughout their lifecycle. SOA also defines and provisions the IT infrastructure to allow different applications to exchange data and participate in business processes.” And for a more humorous definition of SOA overload, check out Greg the Architect in the “SOA This, SOA That” video from YouTube.
Do you 
We announced the immediate availability of the iRise simulation template for the iPhone at the Interop and 
It’s Business Analyst appreciation month at CIO.com and Forrester - and it’s a great time to be a business analyst as they are definitely a HOT commodity according to a recent research report.
I ran across an interesting blog post this week from 
Laurie Gray from 
Project risk is keeping federal computer analysts (aka “business analysts” in the private sector) up at night. InformationWeek recently