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iRise today announced that Ralph Szygenda, former global CIO for General Motors, Bell Atlantic and Texas Instruments, has joined iRise as a strategic consultant and member of the iRise Advisory Board. Mr. Szygenda will be heading up the creation of an exclusive CIO advisory council for iRise that will focus on transformation, business and IT communication and closing the gap between sellers and buyers. In addition, Mr. Szygenda will be leading content direction and speaker recruitment, as well as moderating selected events in the iRise executive roundtable series, a world-class platform for CIO networking and information sharing.
“iRise is revolutionary and the world needs to understand the power it brings to organizations that want to close the gap between business and IT,” stated Mr. Szygenda. “The introduction of enterprise visualization is forever changing the process and stakeholder experience of software design and development.”
Mr. Szygenda is known as a “transformation CIO” for business process change and global sourcing with multiple systems integrators. This experience is critically relevant as iRise drives the people, process and technology transformation for companies that build business software.
For more, click here.
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IT organizations around the world have spent the last year focused on cutting costs, but an article in the current issue of CIO points to a new imperative for IT execs – enable the business to move faster. Rob Carter, Global CIO for FedEx, says, “That’s where we can create the most value.” One way Rob is helping FedEx move faster is to use enterprise visualization from iRise to simulate features on fedex.com before they are rolled out to customers. Simulating features can be especially powerful when working across global markets with different cultural requirements. FedEx first used iRise on a project to capture the unique needs of their customers in the Asia-Pacific region.
From the CIO article:
“The visualization tools helped the design team pinpoint the types of features that customers in the Asia-Pacific region wanted from fedex.com, which resulted in a successful launch. Three months after the online service was introduced it led to an increase in the number of international packages shipping through the online channel…”
On-time and on-budget delivery of business applications still matters, but as global complexity increases, leading businesses like FedEx are going to increasing rely on IT agility to accelerate the delivery of effective solutions that meet their needs.
If you can use visualization to achieve a more efficient and effective software development process, that’s great. But, if you can use visualization to help your company respond to the complexities of the global marketplace, that’s where the real money is.
What is your company doing to cut the delivery time for critical business applications – post a comment to let us know.
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There’s a new Federal CTO in town and early looks at his agenda are filled with words like innovation and transformation. Aneesh Chopra was previously the Secretary of Technology for the state of Virginia and will now be working alongside the new federal CIO Vivek Kundra. According to a recent article in Federal Computer Week, Mr. Chopra outlined four themes that will guide his work in this newly created role:
1. Bring as much policy rigor as possible to transforming the country’s economy through technology-based innovation. “It will be important to think about how we introduce policy to foster innovation” nationally, as well as across state and jurisdictional boundaries.
2. Look for game-changing ways to address the president’s priorities through so-called innovation platforms, or new approaches using technology. Three areas of focus will be:
- Open standards. “We need the private sector to lead, but we need a culture of open standards,” he said. That doesn’t preclude proprietary standards, he added. But open standards and applications that could be shared and replicated easily would remain at the center of efforts to drive innovation.
- Government research and development. Chopra also envisioned redirecting where the government might focus its research and development commitment. “There’s an emerging debate of how far up the [R&D] food chain we should go” and whether the government should target resources closer to the application stage, he said, adding that he would examine opportunities “in the middle ground, south of procurement and north of R&D.”
- Crowd sourcing. Chopra said the government would continue to tap the potential of crowd sourcing, or the use of networks of contributors, to gather new ideas and fuel public-sector innovation.
3. Deliver on the president’s commitment to ensure that the country has a reliable and trustworthy digital infrastructure.
4. Commitment to greater transparency, citizen participation and collaboration.
An interesting quote from the article was directed at software developers: “We’re going to have start a dialogue to develop bug-free software or bug-free software development.”
In addition to focusing on policy recommendations and technology innovations that support the president’s priorities for the economy, health care costs and education, Chopra said he would also look for tools that could help spur innovation. One possibility is working with the General Services Administration to develop an “innovation sandbox” where project ideas could be tested and shared across the government. He also said the government would use new interactive technologies to seek broad public input and then begin to craft policy recommendations.
Sounds like visualization might be a good vehicle for this kind of collaborative input?
At iRise we applaud the focus on improving federal IT and applying best practices learned from the commercial world to the public sector. As taxpayers we should all be concerned about cutting wasteful government spending; failure is simply no longer an option. There is a huge opportunity to modernize and innovate along the themes outlined by Mr. Chopra and we support the effort.
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The Standish Group just released the summary version of their 2009 CHAOS Report that tracks project failure rates across a broad range of companies and industries. From their press release:
“This year’s results show a marked decrease in project success rates, with 32% of all projects succeeding which are delivered on time, on budget, with required features and functions” says Jim Johnson, chairman of The Standish Group, “44% were challenged which are late, over budget, and/or with less than the required features and functions and 24% failed which are cancelled prior to completion or delivered and never used.”
There’s only one place where failing 68% of the time means you are a hero: baseball. If you’re batting average is over .300, you’re earning a fat paycheck in Major League Baseball. But in the software development world, batting .320 is a dismal number. Makes you wonder why more IT leaders aren’t getting replaced!
“These numbers represent a downtick in the success rates from the previous study, as well as a significant increase in the number of failures”, says Jim Crear, Standish Group CIO, “They are low point in the last five study periods. This year’s results represent the highest failure rate in over a decade”
When are companies going to stop wasting billions of dollars on failed projects? The vast majority of this waste is completely avoidable; simply get the right business needs (requirements) understood early in the process.
When the design of physical products moved from drafting boards to CAD, 3D visualization and modeling tools, the issues of failure due to poor requrements disappeared. It’s time the software industry took a page from that lesson book and did the same.
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Visualization is getting a high level of buzz in the market and with good reason. With 300 customers and tens of thousands of business stakeholders, business analysts, user experience professionals and product managers all using iRise to visualize before coding, people are bound to notice.
Dan Woods from Evolved Media writes a regular column for Forbes.com called JargonSpy. In Dan’s May 19th column he talks about how simulation is the right prescription for agile teams: “This week the JargonSpy argues that so-called high-fidelity user-interface simulation techniques accelerate software development, reduce the cost of running an agile development cycle and improve the quality of feedback. This should be big news for anyone spending even a small amount of money-developing software for end-users.”
“Practitioners of agile development find that they avoid train wrecks by getting feedback early and often. First, the development team creates a working version of the software and solicits feedback from users. With this information in hand, the software designers get an idea of the features and functions that really work.”
To view the entire article from Forbes.com, click here.
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SDTimes posted an article about the ever-increasing importance of the business analyst (BA) in software development. In this piece, author Jennifer deJong describes the new style analyst, a role that demands more IT expertise and a deeper business understanding than ever before. No longer the generic bridge between business and IT, the new business analyst must tap into everything from strategic issues (e.g. a company’s exit strategy) to technical implementation specifics.
This “new analyst” idea underscores what iRise has been evangelizing. The BA’s role is to bridge the communication gap between business and IT. iRise’s visualization software elegantly solves that problem by bringing both parties together to easily review and iterate a proposed application, then use the approved simulation as a blueprint to which both teams refer back. Visualization is what allows a BA to cut through the miscommunication issues that often plague application projects. The status quo for doing visual mock-ups has traditionally been static wire frames and PowerPoint screen shots – a process that can be painful, costly and time-intensive. As the BA function has evolved, the technology has now finally caught up so business analysts can fly through simulations in high fidelity with a group of stakeholders, leaving the days of missed requirements and rework behind.
To learn more about the shifting role of the business analyst, listen to Carey Schwaber’s Webinar and the report she co-authored with Rob Karel.
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I wrote a blog post in April about my thoughts on Innovation, the Federal Government and iRise. In response to the post, I received a comment this week asking about the correlation between CMMI ACQ and iRise and decided that the best way to answer would be in a new blog post.
First, some background information for the uninitiated. CMMI for ACQ (acquisition) is a Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) model designed for use in managing a supply chain by those who acquire, procure, or otherwise select and purchase products and services for business purposes. General Motors is partnering with Software Engineering Institute on developing this model and more on CMMI ACQ can be found from the Software Engineering Institute website.
Interestingly, this question also came up at the Government Executive Roundtable that iRise hosted on May 9th. A panel of representatives from aerospace/defense, government, academia, and manufacturing came together to have a conversation about innovation. One of the key questions was how could large complex teams (spanning many time zones, buildings, functional silos, government regulations, contractual terms, and the diversity and richness of human culture and textual / spoken words) do a better job of buying (acquiring) and making (building, extending, integrating, customizing, implementing) software to address massively complex “running the business of the government” capabilities for this new century. Especially where bureaucracy is dead and the network take its place?
At the highest level, Keith Glennan, CTO of Northrop Grumman IT Solutions spoke about demands for the “next generation enterprise”. “Agile and engaged talent” and “enterprise operational velocity” combined with a “distinct customer experience” are needed to address mega trends such as emerging virtual economies, geo politics, economics, demographics, environment, and developing markets.
Keith also pointed out that, “Simulation and Analytics”, “Social Networking & Collaboration” and “Continuous Strategy” were three of the “Top 5″ IT Enabling Strategies. More specifically he shared some thoughts around communicates of practices, virtual worlds, and Wiki. His concluding point was: “Innovation is defined as an organization’s ability to creatively combine new and existing technologies, processes and organizational capabilities to form unique or even disruptive solutions that add differentiating value to the business.”
Finally, Keith talked about the need to “do more with less” and “to make a difference”. iRise enables companies to see or discover how to accomplish this and then to build something that gets it done.
This discussion set the stage for Rich Frost from General Motors to then talk about “making innovation happen” including the broad spectrum from “generating ideas” to “constructing a solution” to a “solution that customers use” on a global basis. Why GM and what’s the connection with government? Like the Federal government, GMs has outsourced all needs for IT services and software, for decades. Are there an lessons to be learned there? Most definitely as GM is collaborating with the SEI at Carnegie Mellon, with the DoD and NASA for “Acquisition”.
Rich’s opening comments summarized the GM mission for IT very well and puts ACQ into perspective:
- IT Executives must continuously drive Innovation*, Efficiency, and Security
- IT Executives must consciously balance their internal staff and supplier sourcing
GM drives innovation and performance with:
- Integrated processes based on CMMI-ACQ
- Incremental Delivery Lifecycle
- Visualization
Rich mentioned that 75% of every IT dollar spend within government and the commercial world is spent on Acquisition, but that CMMI focused on the developer and development, not the customer and outcomes. “Requirements” were identified as the key element for success along with architecture, project management, and “supplier alignment”. Rich also talked about how visualizing capabilities with stakeholders is a key enabler and how visualization drives “ethical” partnerships with suppliers.
He also correlated iRise visualization with CMMI-ACQ at GM with these 10 points:
- Bring the “Idea to Life” early in process
- Mature, Validate, and Refine before building
- Low fidelity prototypes built early to show ideas
- Rapid iteration and refinement before coding
- Visualization accelerates construction
- Communication vehicle for idea generator
- Construction team builds the right solution
- Visualization also accelerates adoption
- Users provide feedback and suggestions on new ideas
- Users know about new innovations and feel buy-in
The bottom line correlation between CMMI-ACQ and iRise is VISUALIZE TO MODERNIZE and SIMULATE TO INNOVATE.
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This is a reminder that there is just 1 week left to vote for your favorite videos in the iRise “Visualize the Prize” video commercial contest. There are 15 semi-finalists and you may vote once per day.
Cast Your Vote on the Official Voting Page
You may also watch all of the contest entries here.
The semi-finalists include (in no particular order):
As Al Capone once said, “Vote early and vote often”.
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Catalyze Webcast – “10 Tips for Driving Better Project Outcomes”
Featuring Carey Schwaber of Forrester Research
Thursday, June 12 @ 10am Pacific/1pm Eastern
Register for the webcast here.
It’s no secret that in the battle to bring effective business software to market on time and on budget, business analysts are on the front line.
- What can business analysts do to improve requirements definition practices and make a difference in project outcomes?
- What skills do business analysts need?
- What roles can they play?
- What tools should they use, and what role should those tools play?
Don’t miss this valuable online seminar sponsored by iRise and featuring one of the industry’s leading experts on the subject of requirements definition, Carey Schwaber, a senior analyst from Forrester Research. Carey has talked with hundreds of organizations that use a variety of requirements definition tools and methods. From this experience and accumulated knowledge, she has developed a set of 10 practical tips that you can immediately put into action in your own organization.
If you cannot make the live webcast, the recording will be uploaded to the iRise and Catalyze websites by June 16.
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iRise Now Available In 9 Countries Outside of United States
Good news if you live in Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, India, Brazil or Mexico because iRise is now immediately available for purchase in your country.
According to Maurice Martin, president, chief operating officer and founder of iRise, “Business software projects have suffered for years with poor communication of needs and requirements – and these issues are not isolated to North America. We’re seeing strong demand for visualization from all over the world as a strategy to finally solve one of the last great problems in software delivery and we’re excited to be able to begin the process of offering iRise globally.”
Digital River helped us set up an online shopping portal for outside the US. They will act as our ‘merchant’ and will be able to take credit cards for international orders. The iRise Inside Sales team can now easily respond to international inquiries and will provide access to the site.
The press release announcing this capability is available from the iRise website.
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