The iRise Blog

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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A new article by Heather Havenstein about how UPS is bolstering their web application development with iRise came out in Computerworld.com yesterday. The article summarizes how UPS has overhauled it process of designing user interfaces for all of their new and upgraded web applications.

This story is not new to anyone who attended Fusion ‘07 last year as Guy Hamblen was one of the our featured speakers. In fact, you can read the blog post and listen to Guy’s presentation from this October iRise blog post.

Here are some new quotes from Guy:

• “The biggest challenge that an application development team has is eliciting the correct requirements at the beginning of the development effort”
• “By modeling the user interface in the requirements phase, the design team can be sure that it knows exactly what the user wants because it has used a simulated version”
• “That allowed us to improve our time to market with application-development releases. That is the fundamental business driver that iRise enabled for us”

The complete Computerworld article is available here.

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Is your software simple and usable?

There was an interesting opinion piece at Sandhill.com last week titled “Simplicity: What’s Next in Business Software” by Anthony Deighton of QlikTech. 

Anthony pointed out that the gap between what software users experience in their workplace and in the rest of their life is widening while the line between work and home continues to blur.  Business users are starting to expect that the applications they use at work be as clear, user-friendly, intuitive and simple as the other software they use.

The bottom line is that enterprise software vendors must “simplify or die” by embracing a philosophy of simplicity or risk getting left behind in the future by innovative and emerging vendors.

There are several characteristics of “simple” software that Anthony lists in his piece, including:

• Continue to offer robustness - “simple” is not the same as “lite”
• Focus on the user - enterprise software vendors need to focus on the user for a change
• Revamp the value chain - make sure you pick partner vendors and service providers who embrace the simplicity vision
• Deliver a fast sales and implementation process - the product must be easy for users, but also deliver quick value to the business
• Relentlessly pursue simplicity - you have to keep focusing on making your product usable and faster to deploy

Check out the full article and complete discussion thread from this link.

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According to an article in InformationWeek, a recent survey shows a decline in citizen satisfaction with eGovernment portals and Websites.   The survey was conducted by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) and shows the lowest satisfaction score in three years.  Not surprisingy, a good portion of the angst is being caused by poor experience using these sites.  According to Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results and author of the report; “Some government Web sites may be holding off on putting the necessary resources into improving the citizen experience until they have a better sense of whether or not they’ll be able to finish what they start. Unfortunately, citizens are the big losers when e-government is in limbo.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Government agencies are clearly playing catch-up to their commercial brethren in focusing on customer experience, but it’s quickly becoming an imperative as computer-savvy baby boomers become increasingly active with government services.   Not to mention Millenials that expect to interact with the DMV, voter registration and everything else under the sun through the Web.  And guess what?   Commercial sites of all kinds are setting a high bar; they’re becoming richer in design, content and transactional capabilities every day. 

Visualization is becoming a key strategy for moving user-centric design to the front-end of critical projects in the commercial sector.  Just look at what Wachovia, WaMu, CitiBank and others are doing.   Customer experience is the hot topic of the day across financial services, retail and other industries that are driven by reducing contact center traffic, improving conversion rates and increasing order size.  

“The truth is out there,” to borrow a line from the old X-Files TV show.

It’s time that visualization become a standard on government projects as well.   We will all benefit.

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In the March 2008 issue of the Harvard Business Review, David Upton and Bradley Staats from the Harvard Business School wrote an article about a radically new approach to developing IT systems called the path-based approach. As the authors state in the opening sentence, “enterprise IT projects continue to be a headache for business leaders.”

The article is a case study of Japan’s Shinsei Bank IT department and how they revolutionized retail banking in Japan.  Masamoto Yashiro, the former chairman of Citibank Japan, was brought in as the new CEO in 2000 and he hired Jay Dvivedi, who used to run IT operations for Citibank Japan as his Chief Information Officer.  Together, they led the development of a new enterprise IT system using the path-based method of application development. They call it the path-based approach because it focuses on providing a path for the system to be developed instead of attempting to define all of the specifications or requirements for a system before the project is launched. Shinsei succeeded in developing and deploying an entirely new enterprise system in one year at a cost of $55 million. 

Traditionally, there are two choices for building a major enterprise system - the “big bang” approach of replacing the current system and processes all at once or the incremental method of improving the existing system one piece at a time.  Shinsei did not want the risk of the “big bang” method and did not have the time to implement the incremental method, so they chose a third method called the path-based method.  Some of the principles of the path-based method are variations on old themes while others are totally unconventional. 

Here are some things they learned:

Don’t just align business and IT strategies - forge them together — Besides having the CIO report to the CEO, Shinsei business managers spend significant amounts of time in learning about IT.  In addition, they focus on understanding “foreseeable business objectives” and the interaction between business and IT groups is iterative and continuous.

Strive for extreme simplicity — Shinsei succeeded by employing the simplest possible technologies.  There were three keys to their simpler approach, limit the number of standards, create simple re-usable solutions and apply modularity to clearly specify user interfaces.

Give (some) power to the people — Many project failures stem from organized resistance to new systems.  When Shinsei rolls out a new system, they start by offering an interface that is similar to the old system - and only after users are comfortable with a new system do they turn off the old screens.  Shinsei also created a system for including feedback and requests from employees, customers, business users and technical users.  Comments have averaged about 100 requests per day which helps Shinsei continually improve systems and processes.

The conclusion is that “businesses must focus on building IT systems that cannot fail to improve…and adopting the path-based approach will provide flexible systems that can change as the business demands and can shift IT from being a simple platform for existing operations to a launchpad for new functions and brand new businesses.” 

Imagine what would happen if you marry path-based method of application development with the visualization capabilities of iRise? 

The complete article is a worthwhile read and is currently available for free from the Harvard Business Review website.

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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.

Federal industry expert Steve Meltzer, president of Meltzer & Associates and former director of the General Services Administration’s (GSA) Federal Computer Acquisition Center captured the government’s new priorities in IT purchasing and development:

“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.

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This month iRise announced a partnership with Advanced Concepts Center (ACC), a consulting and learning solutions company. ACC offers technology education services to business analysts to improve employee productivity. We’re excited about this collaboration as it’s another step in normalizing visualization software as a global standard for companies building business applications. This partnership is, in part, a response to the  evolving role of the business analyst (BA) in successfully communicating business initiatives.

In this new order where usability is king, the disconnect between business and IT is no longer acceptable.  For many companies, the answer to this eternal question is the savvy business analyst; that rare bird who is both business- and technical-minded.  According to Gartner Research there are 600,000 business analysts in the U.S.  Like it or not, the BA is fast becoming a linchpin for which the success of business initiatives hinge.  For iRise, training BAs on our visualization software is a natural fit.  With ACC on board, the business analyst has even more training options available.  We welcome them into our growing cadre of regional partners.

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Investing in better design has always been a tough sell to non-believers, in part because there aren’t enough clear and easy ways to show different levels of design attention.  Here is one method I have used recently:

This chart shows the adoptability of a product based on where it sits on a continuum from Functional to Usable to Desirable.  Rough descriptions of each are:

• Functional = A user can finish what someone could describe as a functional task but doesn’t necessarily meet their needs or goals as a user.
• Usable = A user can meet needs and goals without frustration.
• Desirable = The satisfaction of needs and goals is done in such a way that a user builds a positive emotional association with the product (i.e. positive product equity).

Adoptability in the software world is a measure of whether or not people who have bought the product are actively using it.  In other words, is it used or is it shelfware?  Being used doesn’t just mean higher support costs… it means that a customer is actually getting value and associating that benefit with the product and the brand.

What this shows on the lower right side is that yes, there are software products that can be adopted that are almost purely functional if they provide a huge amount of relative value.  However, even if they are adopted in a temporary fashion, the negative product equity associated with them means that they are easily and enthusiastically displaced by competitors.  The dot shows a product that moves from no adoption, to adoption with negative product equity, to adoption with positive product equity.

Desirability Testing

One interesting implication of this is that software companies should do all three types of testing in order to drive the proper behavior in valuing each:  Functional Testing, Usability Testing, and Desirability Testing.  Desirability Testing doesn’t really yet exist in any formal sense, so this is a good area for further research and experimentation.

Product Equity

Product equity is like brand equity but focused just on the product and not the overall brand experience.  The impact of positive product equity is that customers will continue to use the product in the face of competitive alternatives and will buy additional products from the same vendor.

Are there other methods you have used or seen to meet the same goal of communicating different levels of design attention?

[This entry was originally posted to the blog The Product Architect on December 8, 2007.]

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I really enjoy seeing companies you work with almost every day
(in my case, alliance partners), take a leadership position to embrace
what you have been evangelizing to the market. Last month, Capgemini announced the launch of the Rapid Design & Visualization (RDV) Lab. Though the Lab is now available nationwide through all their Accelerated Solutions Environments (ASEs), the RDV Lab has been in place for several year and iRise has been actively working with and a primary solution in the practice with many joint customers. The announcement was made at SOA World, an appropriate place since visualization is critical to understanding what business stakeholders want that can be enabled in a SOA environment (but more on that in a later post…).

The RDV Lab continues to expand Capgemini’s work in the field of simulation by using a methodology that combines the latest simulation and communication tools with new research on how people create complex software. Capgemini estimates that 60 percent of such programs – including ERP (SAP, Oracle, etc.), Web 2.0 and SOA initiatives – encounter rework following misunderstandings between project managers who write the specifications, and the engineers who build the programs.  The announcement states, “The RDV is designed to help all parties get the software right the first time” - sound familiar? Absolutely, because Capgemini and iRise both believe that people, process and technology are required to really bring the full benefits of getting software right the first time.

Corey Glickman, the national leader for the Capgemini RDV Lab,
has been a champion for simulation and visualization for years
and an iRise user, speaking on different aspects at iRise User Conferences and interviews. Corey recently stated, “The RDV lets designers substitute images for nouns, animation for verbs, and a full–blown simulation for a phone book of instructions.” Is visualization really is the new language for designing software? I think Corey hit it right on the mark.

Capgemini has really taken the lead among global system integrators in piloting this effort years ago and now launching capabilities nationwide. For example, last year I presented Capgemini with the iRise Alliance Advantage Partner of the Year award for its substantial work (among other things) with one of our large manufacturing customers. Though the market for simulation is still young and in the evangelism stage, with the help of Capgemini, more companies will experience the benefits of visualization and share their success.

I look forward to sharing more examples of iRise alliance partners adopting the new language for designing software.

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If you are a usability fan or just want to learn more about the key topics in usability, you need to check out the article on “30 Usability Issues To Be Aware Of” from Smashing Magazine.

The exhaustive list includes definitions for 30 usability issues, including my favorites — the Baby-Duck-Syndrome and the Zeigarnik Effect.

-7±2 Principle
-2-Second-Rule
-3-Click-Rule
-80/20 Rule (The Pareto principle)
-Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design
-Fitts’ Law
-Inverted Pyramid
-Satisficing
-Baby-Duck-Syndrome
-Banner-Blindness
-Cliffhanger-Effect (Zeigarnik-Effect)
-Gestalt principles of form perception
-The Self-Reference Effect
-Eye-Tracking
-Fold
-Foveal viewport (Foveal area)
-Gloss
-Graceful Degradation (Fault-tolerance)
-Granularity
-Hotspot
-Legibility
-Minesweeping
-Mystery-Meat Navigation (MMN)
-Physical consistency
-Progressive Enhancement (PE)
-Readability
-User-centered design (UCD)
-Vigilance (sustained attention)
-Walk-Up-And-Use Design
-Wireframe

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