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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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The Washington Post reported this week that the federal government has launched a new website to track the progress of over $70 billion worth of IT spending. The initiative is being sponsored by Vivek Kundra, the federal CIO appointed by Barack Obama earlier this year.
The new site: http://usaspending.gov/ is pretty interesting already. It tracks IT spending in a dashboard format from most agencies and federal government departments. The dashboard tracks top contractors receiving government IT funds as well as agency updates, the latest news on IT project awards and project status.
The new portal is the latest in a series of efforts to open up a public window into federal IT spending.
From the Washington Post article:
“Everyone knows there have been spectacular failures when it comes to technology investments,” Kundra said. “Now for the first time the entire country can see how we’re spending money and give us input.”
iRise applauds this latest move towards transparency. The first step towards transformation is awareness. Shining the light of transparency on taxpayer-funded IT projects will force improvements in people, process and technology that will ultimately transform IT in fundamental ways. Modernization efforts will get streamlined, citizen access will be improved and best practices captured. Ultimately we will all benefit.
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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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An important bill designed to prevent endemic waste surrounding federal government IT projects has passed a Senate committee vote. The Information Technology Investment Oversight Enhancement and Waste Prevention Act (S. 3384) would require federal agencies to regularly report to Congress on significant shortfalls in the cost, schedule and performance of their IT programs. The legislation would also encourage better planning and ensure that officials are alerted soon after problems arise. This bill was passed by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on October 1st and now faces a full vote on the floor of the Senate. A separate version of the Bill is also being considered by the House of Representatives.
Among other provisions, the proposed Bill requires projects that are over 40% off schedule or cost estimates to be reported directly to Congressional oversight committees. At that point these distressed projects would have access to a small ’strike force’ of experienced private and public sector IT experts that would focus on areas like earned value management, defining requirements and project management.
The full text of the bill can be found here.
Here’s an interesting article on the subject by Meredith Levinson in CIO.com.
Is this new legislation a good thing? Norm Brown seems to think so. Norm is the executive director for the Center for Program Transformation and his testimony before the same Senate sub-committee seemed to support the view that federal IT projects need all the help they can get:
“Literally billions of taxpayer dollars go down the drain every year in both visible and invisible Information Technology (IT) acquisition waste. IT projects too often experience problems of cost explosions, schedule black-holes, performance disappearances, and large-scale train-wrecks-many caused by violating one or more fundamental laws of “IT” Physics.”
Requirements is clearly one of the root causes for all the waste and we think visualization could go a long way towards solving the problem.
From our perspective, this proposed legislation is a good thing. Although the results of oversight may not be known from some time, one thing is clear: IT projects everywhere are in distress and anything we can do to stop wasting public money can’t be all bad. Especially in this economic climate, it’s time that government started aggressively adopting best practices for project success from the private sector. And visualization is one of those practices.
What’s your point of view?
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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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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:
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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 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.)
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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