The iRise Blog

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 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:

1. IT Executives must continuously drive Innovation*, Efficiency, and Security
2. 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:

1. Bring the “Idea to Life” early in process
2. Mature, Validate, and Refine before building
3. Low fidelity prototypes built early to show ideas
4. Rapid iteration and refinement before coding
5. Visualization accelerates construction
6. Communication vehicle for idea generator
7. Construction team builds the right solution
8. Visualization also accelerates adoption
9. Users provide feedback and suggestions on new ideas
10. 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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iRise recently conducted a national survey of IT professionals around application definition. The survey revealed that 72% of IT professionals are suffering from increased development cost due to rework and scope creep . According to the survey, poor communication is a fundamental problem. Respondents cited “business stakeholders not being fully invested in the definition process’ or ‘having unrealistic expectations of the end result,” as the key problem in application definition communication.

Last week’s blog post by Forrester Research’s Carey Schwaber, “Which Vendors Have Made A Difference In App Dev?” acknowledged iRise for “waking up the market to the limitations of textual requirements.” This survey shows that many IT professionals are still in need of “awakening.”

Additional survey findings include:

• Over 60% of companies experienced delays, cost overruns and missing features in an application development project in the past two years;
• IT professionals that are prototyping applications are using MS Word, MS Excel, MS PowerPoint and MS Visio to document requirements, and over 60% of these respondents are not fully satisfied with their current method of defining applications;
• 30% of participants said that they are not testing applications before development at all; and,
• Almost 80% of respondents are interested in eliciting customer feedback using a fully functional prototype before coding.

To download the free executive report of this survey visit:

http://www.irise.com/applicationdefinition_surveyreport.

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Abbie Lundberg, Editor in Chief of CIO, recently gave a presentation on “The State of the CIO”.  The presentation provides highlights from CIO Magazine’s annual research in to the state of IT Leadership.

The research identified 3 types of CIOs:

• Function Heads - focused on running the IT organization
• Transformation Leaders - focused on creating change through process transformation
• Business Strategists - focused on driving strategy for competitive advantage

They estimate the breakdown by percentage into each category is as follows:  Function Heads - 37%, Transformation Leaders - 51% and Business Strategists - 12%.  However, they predict the the distribution of CIOs will migrate towards Business Strategists and away from Function Heads in the future.

Links to the following handouts and resources were provided at the end of the presentation:

• State of the CIO 2008 reports
• Strategic Impact Analysis
• CIO Executive Council and Future-State CIO Program
• Egon Zehnder International

The presentation has some great content and conclusions - and can be viewed below.  (If you click on the view button at the bottom of the presentation, you can link to a site where you can view in full screen mode.)

| View | Upload your own

You can also follow Abbie Lundberg on Twitter to keep up with what’s going on in the life of the CIO Editor in Chief.

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iRise Chief Marketing Officer Mitch Bishop talked about marketing ROI at the CMO Club conference today.  You can read the entire blog post at this link.

Here are some of the highlights:

• Success - “When it comes to success, iRise measures everything - but we rely ultimately on revenue ROI.”
• CIO Events - Mitch talked about the CIO events that iRise sponsors at racing venues throughout the year.  The mantra for these events is “World class networking. World class marketing. No Selling.”  

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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.

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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.

1. 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.
2. 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. 
3. 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. 
4. 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.

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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.

Thomas Wailgum of CIO.com wrote an article last week titled “Why Business Analysts Are So Important for IT and CIOs“.  In the article, Thomas references a new report that came out this month from Forrester analysts Carey Schwaber and Rob Karel which is called “The New Business Analyst“. 

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
• Establish centers of excellence for BT analysts

Check out these links for the complete story:

• Forrester “The New Business Analyst” - $279 unless you are a Forrester client
• CIO.com Article - “Why Business Analysts Are So Important for IT and CIOs” - be sure to check out the comments and feedback at the end of the article
• Carey Schwaber spoke at the Fusion ‘07 and her video interview is available from the iRise website

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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.

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The Standish Group  and others have reported over the past decade that more than 30% of all software made for users was, in hindsight, never needed or used to accomplish their mission. The project stakeholders discovered this only after the solutions were delivered at more than several thousand projects surveyed to date. Also reported widely, more than 20% of the code related to functionality and/or usability was found to be “missing” or “wrong” after the users had a chance to interact with the software in real-world mission scenarios. In the survey responses, the terms requirements “reworked” and “moved to the next release” are used interchangeable with the terms “missed”, “misunderstood”, and “changed.”

The Federal IT Budget - With the Standish statistics in mind, more than $10 billion dollars of the $70 billion dollar federal IT budget this year is earmarked for software modernization efforts. Most American citizens and government employees know these efforts are long overdue. The opportunity exists to reduce this expenditure by more than 10% or alternatively to get more for the taxpayer dollars invested on projects already in flight. There is a rapidly increasing “expectations gap” by users and acquirers alike as to what “good software” means for individuals and organizations to take care of business and fulfill assigned missions, tasks and goals.

The Government Needs To Innovate - Michael Schrage, a senior adviser to MIT’s Security Studies Programwrites, “Innovation’ isn’t what innovators do….it’s what customers and clients adopt. His research and advisory work explores the role of models, prototypes and simulations as collaborative media for managing innovation and risk. His ongoing work on strategic and “just-in-time” experimentation is at the core of several corporate transformation efforts. His insights into the economics of “hyperinnovation,” “‘iterative capital” and “innovation cross-subsidies” are redefining executive investment criteria for supply chain and customer relationship initiatives.” He is the author of Serious Play: How the World’s Best Companies Simulate to Innovate.  In the forward provided by Tom Peters, author of In Search of Excellence; Tom writes, “this is simply the best book written on innovation I’ve ever read.” …. “Read! Act! Now!”, he concludes.

Robert Austin, Harvard Chair of the CIO Executive Program focuses on management of innovative and knowledge intensive activities, especially as applied in creative industries and information technology management. He has written on these issues in Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work (co-authored with Lee Devin) and The Role of IT in Innovation-Based Value Creation; where Rob writes, “it will soon be all too apparent. IT, finally mature enough to think of itself as an old dog, very badly needs a new trick.”

Partnering With The Government - Richard Frost is a Global Director at General Motors where he has responsibility for driving systems development, software engineering, and program management globally, including agile development, streamlined development processes, and requirements visualization. As a senior advisor to the SEI CMMI for Acquisition (CMMI-ACQ), a collaborative effort of GM, DoD and NASA, Rich has helped identify best practices for systems acquisition at GM and is helping  incorporate these into a CMMI framework for the customers of technology.

Through innovation and partnerships like GM’s collaboration with SEI, iRise’s expansion into the Federal Market announced last month is tasked with saving the Federal Government a “fistful of cash” and helping accelerate the software modernization efforts over the next several years.

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