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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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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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iRise premier partner id8 recently wrote a very interesting blog post called “Simulate Anything“. In the post, Scott Nelson suggested we start thinking outside of the montior too feel the benefits of using visualization on non-web applications. He speaks about a visualization his team put together (see the video here) of a hand-held barcode scanner.
Given his desire to push the prototyping methodology way outside to web-based applications, he started simply walking around and finding non-web interfaces he could simulate with iRise. His thermostat and microwave both provided interesting opportunities to improve the user interface with visualization. Another iRise partner, OneSpring, has begun visualizing applications for the iPhone.
What types of interfaces could you see yourself visualizing? Me personally, I’d like to see my “all-in-one remote control” reworked 
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PRESS RELEASE ::
iRise Labs Launches Beta Program for Extending iRise Enterprise Edition
iRise today launched a private beta program for the iRise Extension API, an interface definition that will enable third-party development of a broad spectrum of integrations and extensions to the iRise Enterprise Edition platform. iRise customers and alliance partners will be able to leverage the iRise Extension API to extend the capabilities of the iRise platform and more tightly integrate it into their unique development processes and environments. At the same time third-party developers will also be able to create innovative commercial offerings for the iRise ecosystem; solutions that may then be co-marketed by iRise. The private beta period begins today.
iRise is seeking go-to-market partners to deliver commercial offerings in all of these areas, and others. Customers, ISVs and web developers interested in participating in the iRise Extensions API beta program should contact beta@irise.com for more information.
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Author, thought-leader and marketing guru Seth Godin is offering an amazing opportunity for you come work with him for 6 months. It’s not going to be easy to get though. You’ll have to convince him that you’re worthy and willing to drop everything to take advantage of it.
Here’s what he’s planning for the six months:
- One hour a day of class/dialogue
- Four hours a day of working on his projects
- Three hours a day of working on your personal project
- Five hours a day of living, noticing, doing and connecting
Here are some key dates:
- Deadline for applications: December 14, 2008
- Open house in his office by invitation only: December 16.
- Start date: January 19, 2009
Read all about it here http://www.squidoo.com/Alternative-MBA
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I’ve been here at iRise for nearly a year now. I came onboard because I had never seen a tool like this before. iRise has changed the way I visualize new web site and designs, but I haven’t always had access to such a powerful tool (don’t forget to download a 30-day trial if you haven’t yet). Nope, there was a time in my life I had to use other tools.
Tools like:
- Adobe Photoshop – Photoshop has long been my tool of choice. It offered no interaction, but I had plenty of reusable assets to speed my process.
- MS Powerpoint – I often used Powerpoint in conjunction with Photoshop to share my vision.
- HTML – For me, one of the slower yet powerful ways to visualize
- Flash – The slowest way to visualize (for me anyways)
These were fine for visualizing my point, but then I needed a way to collaborate with my stakeholders. For that, I used:
- Printouts – Printouts were nice because they let the user write notes that I could then collect and iterate on.
- Magnets – Yep, that’s right. I printed out web widgets on magnetic paper and used them on whiteboards. I would model a page of standard widgets, collaborate with the team and then take a quick photo of the result.
These were the only tools I had to get my point across.
What were some of your early visualization tools?
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The Catalyze Community July 23rd Webcast features two design experts sharing their thought on Personas:
Catalyze July Webcast – Wednesday July 23rd at 11am PDT/2pm EDT
Death to Personas! Long Live Personas!
The Catalyze July Webcast features design experts, Elizabeth Bacon of Devise and Steve Calde of Cooper talking about Personas. Elizabeth and Steve will address the misconceptions around the use of personas and share some best practices for leveraging personas during the research and design phase.
- fluffy
- expensive to create
- non-actionable
- limiting
- counterproductive to innovation
If you can’t wait for the webcast to learn more about personas, check out these two resources:
- Steve Calde’s article for the Cooper Journal called “Using Personas to Create User Documentation“
- Bill Cooper’s essay on the Origins of Personas
And here is some background information on our speakers:
Elizabeth Bacon is co-founder and Chief Design Officer at Devise, a boutique interaction design and software development consultancy. She began her career at Cooper, where she researched and designed products and also helped to refine methodology. She subsequently worked for five years at St. Jude Medical, a Fortune 500 company where she designed solutions for implantable medical devices and clinical systems. She is also presently the Vice-President of IxDA, the Interaction Design Association, an international organization for advancing the profession of interaction design
Steve Calde is a Principal Design Consultant at Cooper, where he’s been helping to make the digital world a safer place for users since 1998. Steve has worked on scores of design projects in diverse domains such as golf course irrigation, IT administration, online radio, enterprise resource management, intravenous medication delivery, telecommunications, and more. Steve also teaches Cooper’s Interaction Design Practicum and Communicating courses. In a previous life, Steve was a technical writer for Rational Systems and GW Associates (semiconductor factory automation).
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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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We are proud to announce the winners in the iRise “Visualize the Prize” Video Commercial Contest. The 15 semi-finalists received more than 4,500 votes during the two weeks of voting that ended on June 20th, and it was a pretty tight race.
The winning entry was “iRise Recipe” submitted by Brian Palatucci of Santa Monica, California. Brian wins $15,000 for his video which depicts a man preparing dinner for his girlfriend while asking the question, “What if there was a way to learn from your mistakes without ever having to make one?”
There were 2 runners-up entries that each claimed a prize of $2,500.
“Foresight is 20/20” by Michael Beeson of Great Falls, Montana – This video looked at iRise from the perspective of a spectacle manufacturer which lost its focus before trying iRise. “It’s made painful hindsight a thing of the past because thanks to iRise, foresight is now 20/20.”
“A Celebration of iRise” by Ron Rogers of Healdsburg, California – This video compared the process of developing company Web sites to the wine industry which doesn’t reveal the finished product until the very end. “Now that calls for a celebration!”
Visit the official contest website to check out the semi-finalists and all contest entries.
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