What are Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and how can your organization use them?

Maurice Martin, iRise President, COO and Founder, wrote an article recently that answered these questions for Hotel Business Review Executive magazine.

I’ve summarized some key points below and you can get a copy of the article from the iRise Website.

“RIAs represent a real opportunity for companies to improve their online offerings because they are the tools that provide Web designers the greatest flexibility in meeting the needs of your brand. But added richness will not always equate to an improved (or even a good) experience. At every point, you must think about what the best possible experience is for your customers.”

The article also included a discussion of the five pitfalls of adopting RIA:

1. Not understanding customer needs
2. Implementing for technology’s sake
3. Creating a distracting experience
4. Reduced web site performance
5. Limited metrics tracking and reporting

If you are interested in learning if RIA is right for you and how to avoid the risks, be sure check out the article.

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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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While iRise is not ‘officially’ supporting iRise on the Mac yet, people are already using iRise Studio and iRise Reader on the Mac.  So don’t think that you can’t experience the power of visualization on iRise because you are a Mac user, because you can.

iRise’s QA department is also starting to do some preliminary testing with iRise on the latest versions of the 2 emulators to gain some hands-on experience.  This blog post discusses some of the Windows operating system or OS emulators that people have been using on the Mac and identifies a couple of key points to keep in mind.

The two emulators which let you run Windows software side-by-side in the Mac OS include:

• VMWare Fusion
• Parallels Desktop

iRise probably works with Apple’s Boot Camp (which lets you partition you hard drive to dual-boot Windows and the Mac OS), but the two emulator products are being looked at first.  Note that the Windows emulators or virtualization software mentioned above lets you run Windows side-by-side within the Mac OS.

Here are some key points to keep in mind:

• RAM - 4 gigabytes of RAM is recommended due to the overhead of running the Mac OS as well as the emulator
• Studio and Reader only - we are not currently looking into running Definition Center on the Mac and do not have any experience with this combination
• Browser - you will need to run the Internet Explorer browser as iRise is not compatible with Safari
• Issues - Parallels seems to have a couple of re-paint issues on newer Java applications that do not occur in Fusion

If you have comments, questions or real life experiences to share, please visit the iRise User Community on Catalyze.  We have also posted details of what we are currently testing in our QA department in the iRise General Forum and have started a discussion topic called iRise on the Mac.

For more information on the iRise User Community, check out this link.

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James Maguire from Datamation filmed a “virtual booth crawl” with 30 second pitches from select vendors - most of whom were being awarded for innovation in software. You can check it out here or watch below.

Yours truly happened to be manning the booth when James came by. I gave my best 30 second rendition regarding iRise below.

Originally posted at http://ideasbyjohn.wordpress.com/

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What is Twitter?  According to the Twitter website, ” Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?” .  Twitter lets you send 140 character messages that are visible to anyone and the messages can be sent via the web, IM, cell phone SMS text messaging and the Twitter API.  Twittering is also referred to as micro-blogging - and most Twits are easier to read and scan because of the 140 character limitation.

Twitter is definitely moving into the mainstream as evidenced by these two recent quotes:

• “Twitter is one of the fastest-growing phenomena on the Internet” - New York Times
• ‘Twitter is on its way to becoming the next killer app” - TIME Magazine

Common Craft put together this short video to explain Twitter:

 

Why do I care?  Sure, people share some mundane things in their life, but the real value of Twitter is gathering a group of people you follow and learning from them.  I use Twitter to find great blog posts and other resources that I may have otherwise missed.  Many astute companies are now using Twitter from a marketing perspective to listen to what their customers are saying and to promote blog posts, news articles and press releases.  For example, CIO.com is active in Twitter as well as the Editor-in-Chief, Abbie Lundberg, and editor/writer Esther Schindler.  People have even ‘twittered’ about iRise and there is even a website called Tweetscan where you can search on companies, people and other phrases.

Twitter Resources  Here are some other essential Twitter links to check out:

• Twitter Guide by Caroline Middlebrook
• Advanced Twittering by Jim Storer of Mzinga
• Twitter 101 presentation by Dustin Jacobsen
• Twitter Resources in the EKIVE blog
• Twitter Resource Roundup from the ext337 blog
• A Talk with the Twitter Guys - Shel Israel interviews the Twitter founders
• Twitter Pack - see who you should follow sorted by company, topic, geography, industry and profession.  For example, there is a list of the key Usability/UX professionals who Twitter.

It does take some upfront investment of time to get started with Twitter and you have to find the right set of people to follow who are not going to waste your time.  Here is a copy of my Twitter feed so you can visualize the value for yourself.  Scroll down and see who I’m following.  You can click on a user name to access a person’s profile on Twitter and start following them.

You can find me on Twitter at @tomhumbarger.  I look forward to seeing you in the “twittersphere”.

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One happy iRise user who already downloaded the Common Samples iDoc had this to say, “This is one of iRise’s best pro-active customer service moves.  So smart.  Big props to those who built them in the PS Group.”

The iDoc is provided as a convenience for all users to learn advanced features and improve their knowledge of iRise.  The iDoc is available for download from the iRise Users section of the Catalyze Community.  You must be sign into the Catalyze Community and have iRise User Permissions to download the iDoc.  If you are not yet a member of Catalyze or the iRise Users Communities, you can get more information and register from this link.

Here are the key links to the Common Samples documents in Catalyze.

• Common Samples iDoc
• Common Samples Discussion
• Common Samples Table of Contents

Each Sample contains a description of the functionality, the degree of difficulty, steps to demonstrate the functionality and steps on how to build the simulation in iRise as noted below:

Enjoy!  If you have any comments or questions about the Common Samples iDoc, please use the Common Samples discussion forum in Catalyze.  And thank you iRise Professional Services.

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“iRise for iPhone”™ gives business analysts, user experience (UX) professionals and others a way to quickly prototype the look, feel and behavior of iPhone applications by making available pre-defined visualization widgets and templates that can be quickly assembled into a high definition mobile applications. 

The template can simulate all of the iPhone’s standard menu icons and user actions, such as using sliders and zooming in and out of screens by “pinching” and “unpinching.” Application designers can use it to create custom buttons, manipulate the menu icons and define the effects of actions such as double-tapping a button.

Our alliance partner, OneSpring, developed the capability and is also providing the “OneSpring iPhone SimDK for iRise”. 

Chuck Converse, a senior user experience architect at OneSpring noted, “Most applications, if you design them for mobile devices, are very text-heavy.  The iPhone’s display capabilities give designers more freedom and a whole new set of choices.”

The full story is available from these related links:

• iRise iPhone press release
• Article from CIO.com and INTEROP

And here is the YouTube video produced by OneSpring which demos the iRise iPhone capability:

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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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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 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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