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The setting for the iRise User Group meeting at the Texas Motor Speedway was a perfect backdrop for three customer case studies that focused on using visualization to help IT be more responsive to business needs and speed delivery of critical business applications.
Customer Case Study: Regional Grocery Chain
The first customer case study of the day featured Roberta Henson, an application development manager for a regional grocery chain, talking about how her company used visualization to increase the responsiveness of its IT department. With iRise, Roberta says that her Business Analysts are able to adapt to business needs more rapidly, acting as solution architects, not just documentation specialists. That’s important in the grocery business, where margins can be razor-thin. Roberta says visualizing software requirements has cut their cycle time from 12 to 18 months, down to 3 to 6 months.
iRise Training and Mentoring has been a big part of the successful transformation to visualization at Roberta’s company. She uses at least 20 days of iRise services each year and brings in an iRise expert to mentor their team when they are working on a high visibility project. One person on Roberta’s team is certified in iRise and she plans to get one or two more certified in the next year. One of her goals for this year is to get 100% of her Business Analysts trained on iRise.
Roberta also believes in taking a community approach to visualization. She set up a community of practice to help spread the knowledge about using iRise. She holds a peer review every month or two and includes internal and outsourced developers along with her iRise team in these sessions. Roberta says that with iRise, “We are more sure that we understand the requirements and the business is more sure that they are going to get the system they need.”
Customer Case Study: VHA
VHA exemplified the idea that visualization helps build a better partnership between business and IT with a joint presentation of their case study. JJ Perry, a Sr. Business Analyst at VHA, talked about the business challenges that led his company to adopt iRise, including consistent UI design, tight schedules and “runaway” requirements sessions that resulted in scope creep. VHA brought in iRise two years ago when they had a change in leadership and wanted to move to a more agile process.
Joe Ruvalcaba shared the podium with JJ and talked about how iRise impacted VHA’s development team. He presented a couple of iRise projects, including a MicroStrategy application for spend analysis. VHA was going to use MicroStrategy’s developers to build prototypes, but then realized they wouldn’t be able to keep up with the process. With iRise, they could run a 2-3 hour requirements gathering session, visualize the results, email an iDoc to the development team at the end of the day, and get feedback from the developers the next morning. Joe says that visualization helped them to identify a “huge” number of requirements discrepancies without impacting any development resources.
Joe and JJ recommend using daily iterations during the requirements phase to keep the momentum going. They also suggest that teams focus on workflow first, before simulating the user interface.
Customer Case Study: Deloitte Consulting
Scott Marvel is a leader in the Information Management practice for Deloitte Consulting. He shared a story about a large oil company with a $3.5B tax liability that was being managed with a “forest” of spreadsheets. They came to Deloitte Consulting to “keep their leadership out of orange jumpsuits.” This was a massive tax reengineering project with a five-year development and implementation plan and an 8-figure price tag. Deloitte initially presented a conceptual architecture to explain how they would approach the project, but their clients were tax attorneys and accountants who didn’t understand a lot of the terms and concepts and refused to sign-off without a clearer picture of what was being proposed. Deloitte was able to win the deal after spending two weeks building a basic visualization of the solution.
Now a year and a half into the project, Scott says that using iRise “went as smoothly as it could have.” He used iRise to simulate the document management process in Microsoft Sharepoint as well as to get approval of the canned reports and ad hoc reporting tools. He also visualized a dashboard from four different user views that resolved concerns about data access and was a real “homerun” for the client.
Victory Lap
As we have in each city, the Dallas User Group meeting wrapped up with an overview of the iRise product roadmap, some suggestions on creative ways to use iRise, and an iRise user panel. But, Dallas attendees had a special treat at the end of the meeting, as we shifted gears and headed down to the track for a few laps around the Texas Motor Speedway. Clearly, iRise users are comfortable with speed because they all jumped at the chance to go 160 mph in the passenger seat of a Nextel Cup race car.
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High above the Windy City, on the 66th floor of the Willis tower, iRise users from the Chicago area were welcomed by Mitch Bishop, iRise CMO, and Emmet B. Keeffe III, iRise CEO. Emmet began the day by sharing his view that years of IT project failures have proven that business users don’t know what they want until they can see it. He suggested that the best way to correct the failures of the past is to visualize applications at the beginning of the software development process to help define the scope and requirements of each application.
Doug Hubbard, Author and Risk Management Expert, has helped companies apply actuarial methods to assess the risk of their IT projects. He warns that the fondness for metrics to predict outcomes and mitigate risks can be dangerous. While metrics usually make us more confident about our decisions, they can actually lead us to make worse decisions than if we were to follow our intuitions.
For example, Doug says that using a scale of 1 to 5 to evaluate things like customer satisfaction can lead to over optimistic results. Studies show that most people will select 3 or 4 on that scale, whereas on a -2 to +2 scale, they are more likely to pick 0. Another problem is overconfidence. Research reveals that IT professionals, as a group, are overconfident – in other words, their level of confidence about their decisions is higher than the percentage of times that their decision is correct.
One of the limitations of metrics is that we usually focus on things that are easy to measure, and ignore the things that are most important to measure. For iRise visualizations, we are more likely to measure the cost savings, even though the business benefits of getting to market faster or becoming more competitive will outweigh the costs by orders of magnitude.
Doug says there is hope for IT professionals. A skeptical attitude about metrics and training to eliminate overconfidence can help to improve our decisions and increase our ability to forecast the outcome of our projects.
Brad Ruiter, Project Manager at Haworth, described how his team became the “agency within”, evangelizing enterprise visualization and helping Haworth achieve dramatic improvements in their software development projects. Before visualization, Brad was involved in a project that was stalled in the requirements phase. They had to write off $350K, ask for $470K more to complete the project, and the users were still not happy with the results.
Haworth is a leading provider of furniture and they wouldn’t think of designing their products without visualization. So, they decided to take the same approach to their software projects. Their goals were to:
- Improve requirements definition
- Reduce project cycle time and cost
- Improve user experience
- Increase communication and collaboration
- Engage our constituents proactively
Using iRise, they compressed their software development process to combine ideation, requirements definition and design into a single step and were able to begin later stages of the process much earlier. Brad recalled an SAP order management project where they were able to define 25 requirements and eliminate 5 unnecessary requirements in a six and a half hour session. Brad said the experience “blew everyone away”.
Brad has also used iRise during the ideation stage, to get budget for a new iPhone application, and with an outside web design agency for a haworth.com project. His advice to other “visualizers” is to remember that changing behavior is a lot harder than changing process and you need to be an evangelist to overcome resistance and succeed. “It’s like a great marriage, 97% is about communication.”
Max Nelson, from Ally Bank (formerly GMAC), believes that visualization is much more than a product; it is a different way of working. Max is leading the charge to use visualization at Ally as they launch their new brand. Max used iRise on the ally.com and ally.ca (Canadian) sites. Max was able to use visualizations to get his call centers trained before the launch, he also used it in their usability testing. He even was able to get Canadian regulators to give them approval for the site based on their visualization.
Max found that posting the simulation made it possible for busy execs to stay involved in the review process, even when they were too busy to come to the meetings. Max cautioned that companies using iRise with outside agencies may run into resistance. “They aren’t motivated to do projects faster and cheaper.” Ally got bids from outside agencies for 3 rounds of prototypes that averaged $60,000 – $80,000 per prototype. He says Ally was able to recover their investment in iRise with their first two projects. Max believes that focusing on the people who own the results, rather than the people who own the IT process, is the key to further expansion of visualization at Ally.
Aleisha Djuricic, from Northwestern Mutual, latched on to visualization as a lever for organizational change and a way to get her company to recognize the value of User Experience design. Aleisha had a flash of insight after visiting the Harley Davidson Experience Gallery. Part of the Harley Davidson museum, the Experience Gallery is a room full of motorcycles in front of a huge screen that played a video of road scenery. Since 65% of the population learns visually, she realized that visualization was the way to get people energized about UX.
Aleisha focused on some early wins; one visualization was praised by their board of directors as the best presentation they had ever seen, another received a standing ovation at their annual sales meeting. The result: visualization is now a recognized technique for gathering requirements.
Aleisha warns fellow UX professionals to be careful what you wish for – once you start using visualizations, be ready to respond to the demand. A few other keys to the success at Northwestern Mutual:
- Don’t try to do continuous visualization. The creative process needs some downtime to digest and process input
- Use high fidelity visualizations for top execs/board to help them “imagine” how the new user experience will be better/different. But, be sure to set expectations that high fidelity won’t be used on every visualization.
- It helps to have an “iRise Whisperer” – a visualization guru on staff who can make iRise do things that even the iRise people think are impossible.
As with the other iRise User Group meetings, the day wrapped up with a presentation about the product roadmap for iRise and an iRise User Panel discussion
Want more details from the Chicago User Group meeting? Video from selected sessions will be available on the iRise site in the coming weeks. The User Group series continues throughout October, next stop: Dallas. Click here for more information on meeting locations and dates.
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After a successful kickoff in New York, the iRise User Group meeting series moved on to Atlanta this week. A few highlights from the Atlanta session:
Emmet B. Keeffe III, iRise CEO, has been thinking about starting a blog called the “Trail of Tears”, chronicling the software development experiences of IT departments around the world. Speaking with hundreds of CIOs each year, Emmet has heard some incredible stories, like the large bank that had a $100M write-off on a single project, or the SAP project that had the right functionality, but such horrible usability the users “revolted” and refused to use it.
Kevin O’Connor, VP Client Services for User Insight, gave the keynote presentation, and talked about usability, not just for products, but for the entire customer experience. When it comes to usability, Kevin suggests we follow Mark Twain’s advice, “Supposing is good, but finding out is better.”
User Insight runs a dozen or so usability testing projects each month and they’ve gleaned some best practices from their experience that he shared with the audience:
- Create a user experience roadmap
- Incorporate voice of customer into your design – create personas and use them to inform and validate new projects
- Iterate with various levels of fidelity and share your results across the company, especially with top level execs
- Spend 8% – 10% of a project budget on usability testing. Most spend 1% or less, so you need to focus on the strategic, high profile applications
Kevin also cautioned that usability and user experience are not the same thing. Great product usability is wasted if it is surrounded by a bad user experience. He cited Apple and Holiday Inn as companies who “get it”, and he shared a story about a DSL company that didn’t. They perfected the usability of a diagnostic tool, but the upstream user experience was so bad that had lost trust in the company and wouldn’t use the tool.
Karen Bennett is responsible for user experience at IHG, parent company for Holiday Inn and 6 other hospitality brands. Her group, including usability, interface design and experience architecture, will double in the next year from its current size of 13. Her team tackles 50 – 60 projects each year.
Karen shared her experiences from the $1B re-launch of the Holliday Inn brand earlier this year. They had to launch the Holiday Inn and Holiday Inn Express sites in 7 languages, and cut 8 months out of the schedule. They built iRise wireframes visualizations and presented them to the execs to get buy-in. They even used a Chinese datasheet to show how the site would look in another language. Visualization helped IHG get a jump start on their content strategy and engage outside agencies much earlier in the process. Karen says, “If we didn’t have iRise, we would have built a multimillion dollar website that nobody could use.” She also warns other companies to be prepared, “when you do this kind of visualization, your phone is going to start ringing off the hook.”
Corey Glickmanis a Principal at Capgemini and founder of their Rapid Development and Visualization (RDV) practice. Corey outlined a variety of factors that are forcing businesses to change their focus from Information Technology, to Business Technology. As CIOs become more strategic, they need their Systems Integrator partners to expand and redefine themselves. ERP implementation is becoming a commodity, so Systems Integrators need to move up the value chain to help clients develop the ideas that will differentiate them, and the systems and processes that will help them execute those ideas.
One way that Capgemini is redefining its services is through their Rapid Design and Visualization (RDV) labs located around the world. These labs help accelerate results, enhance collaborative design, and manage complex ideas through visualization. The labs incorporate Cap’s Accelerated Solutions Environment (ASE) where facilitators and visualizers work with clients to produce powerful results in a very short time. Corey mentioned one client, a European manufacturer of ball bearings, who built a 5-year plan in 5 days using visualization. Cap is able to network their labs together and even links them with iRise Centers of Excellence that are set up at client locations.
Jason Geer, a visualization expert from Bank of America, explained how they are using iRise, along with Rational Requisite Pro to manage over 2,000 projects a year. Jason says B of A gets a variety of benefits from visualization, including:
- Improved requirements
- Higher quality
- Reduced risk and rework
- Speed to market
Reduced costs
At B of A, they started using visualization to gather requirements, then, they moved “upstream” to the ideation and scope definition phases of their project process. They also moved downstream to facilitate the hand-off to development. Jason says, “Simulation helps get everyone on the same page – without a visual, you never know if you are building the right thing.”
An iRise User Panel discussion, along with iRise presentations on the next release of iRise, and creative ways to take visualization to the next level, rounded out the day-long agenda in Atlanta.
Want more details from the Atlanta User Group meeting? Video from selected sessions will be available on the iRise site in the coming weeks. The User Group series continues throughout October, next stop: Chicago. Click here for more information on meeting locations and dates.
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This past Thursday, iRise kicked off the 2009 User Group meeting series at the Bryant Park hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Mitch Bishop, iRise CMO, set the tone for the meeting by asking everyone to stand and do 10 jumping jacks. After catching their breath, the more than 50 users spent an energetic day sharing best practices and getting a sneak preview of the upcoming release of iRise 8, due out in the first quarter of 2010. Here’s a brief summary of the day…
Emmet B. Keeffe III, iRise CEO, welcomed the attendees and shared his definition of the “Enterprise Visualization” market:
- Fully dynamic visualization of software applications
- True platform model, including collaboration and shared content
- Downstream integration – IBM Rational is the first, others (e.g. HP Mercury) are coming
- Transformation services, including change management, training and support to embrace a new way of developing software
Emmet acknowledged that the full potential of “enterprise visualization” requires a transformation of people, process and technology that depends on strong leadership from the CIO’s office. He shared some examples of successful transformations, including BP, FedEx, JPMC and UPS – with UPS “setting the record” for rapid transformation to visualization in just four months.
Following Emmet, Dennis O’Leary, Managing Partner at Encore Financial Partners, took the podium to give his view of the “The Road Ahead”. Dennis sees a lot of bumps i
n the economic road ahead. In fact, he believes that recovery – getting back to where we were – is not possible. Decades of consumer excess, and now government excess, are creating a massive deficit and building a mountain of foreign debt.
IT implications –budgets will continue to be tight, so you have to be selective – focus on the strategic stuff and plug the biggest budget leaks. During his days at JPMC, Dennis developed a rule of 2’s – every project will cost twice as much and take twice as long to develop and will deliver half the expected results. He found the biggest “leakage” was in defining software requirements. Dennis is a big believer that visualization tools like iRise are a great way to avoid budget overruns.
Next on the agenda were three iRise users who shared their stories of introducing visualization into the software development life cycle. Monica Longmire explained how JPMorgan Chase is using visualization to enhance usability on applications that are used by over 200,000 JPMC employees around the world. Key to the success at JPMC is the development of an Interaction Pattern Library – a set of re-usable components that are shared through the iRise Definition Center. Non-technical Business Analysts can check out components from the library, saving them time and helping reinforce corporate interface standards.
Next up: Martin Brunk, Senior Manager for product development at E*TRADE FINANCIAL, talked about his experiences using visualization to help E*TRADE transition its applications to a SAAS model. Martin explained that, before iRise, E*TRADE ran three or four times over budget on software 
projects. But, their first iRise project, a customer-facing web application, came in on-time and on-budget. As an extra bonus, just five months into the project, E*TRADE gave a public demo of the application using Martin’s iRise visualization.
The last customer case study came from Keri Jones, a human factors engineer at a large financial institution. Keri’s company uses a blended agile-waterfall methodology that is based on four-week sprints. Keri says she used iRise to increase their agility – reviewing requirements, finding missed requirements and making changes much more quickly. They used to use Photoshop and Powerpoint, but Keri says it is much quicker and easier with iRise.
After the case studies, the topic turned to the future plans for iRise software. Pete Indelicato, Senior Product Manager at iRise, gave an overview of iRise 8 and demonstrated some of the new features. iRise has been beta testing the new release over the past few months and expects the release to be available in Q1 of 2010. Customers interested in being a part of the beta test program can send an email to beta@irise.com.
Toby Thornton, Associate Director of Enterprise Solutions for iRise, challenged the audience to question traditional thinking and find creative ways to use iRise visualizations. Toby suggested using visualizations for training and usability testing, to get funding for a project, or to kill bad projects early. The full-day agenda wrapped up with an interactive user panel and lots of discussion about ways to encourage adoption of visualization within each attendee’s company.
Want more details from the NY User Group meeting? Video from selected sessions will be available on the iRise site in the coming weeks. The User Group series continues throughout October, next stop: Atlanta. Click here for more information on meeting locations and dates.
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Carol Kilpatrick from Delta Technology presented a case study today on how iRise was used at delta.com in a merchandising application project.
Delta first started using iRise in August 2006 in a pilot project for a flight attendant application and trained 10 users. In February 2007, they started a new pilot project to add merchandising functionality to delta.com. By March 2008, Delta expects to roll out iRise across the organization and will be training up to 70 users.
The Delta Merchandising Project was a project to allow customers to add hotel, car, trip insurance, etc. to the delta.com site. The major opportunity was time-to-market. They thought it was going to be simple and easy, but it turned out to be harder because of time constraints. Usability for a major booking project is ideal because so many people will ultimately end up using the application. Ideally, they would have wanted to recruit users in profile area to test for approx. 1 hour. Due to time constraints, they had to do a quick and dirty usability test by using customers at the airport. Using a custom, portable usability testing lab with 2 laptops and a webcam, they literally pulled people out of the concourse to do testing.
Being able to do usability testing was one of the big wins from using iRise. In past, usability testing was not done until design phase
Carol summarized her presentation by identifying why they used iRise for the delta.com Merchandising project:
- The UX professional could use iRise on the project after minimal instruction
- iRise enables quick simulation turn-around
- iRise supports stakeholder communication through the Definition Center and iDocs
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