Allied North America Insurance Innovates with iRise
Enterprise visualizations used to speed delivery of new software applications

 

Allied North America Insurance, a leading insurance brokerage focused on the construction industry, has adopted iRise to speed up the delivery of new business software. One of the initial projects visualized with iRise was a system used by clients and employees to automate the issuing and tracking of tens of thousands of certificates of insurance for construction projects. The project was delivered 40% faster than with traditional requirements methods, which has driven Allied to now adopt iRise on a broad range of new projects.

“Improving business efficiency is a major goal of IT,” stated Ira Schwartz, CIO for Allied North America and CIO magazine “CIO 100” honoree in 2009. “Visualization has turned out to be a game changer that has not only improved our definition process but enabling us to partner even closer with the business.”

“Using the visualization as a guide, our development team had complete confidence in what they were building,” said Lauren Saverino, director of training and development for Allied. “Our business users were stunned with the improvement; the feedback we received was incredibly valuable and the whole process was accelerated.” . Read More

  
   iRise Events

iRise User Group Meetings a Big Success



Throughout October, iRise held a series of six regional User Group Meetings. The agenda in each city featured case studies, product roadmap presentations and interactive user panels to ask questions and share visualization tips and tricks. A common theme across all of these sessions was “Adoption”. iRise users are discovering that successful adoption depends more on change management skills than it does on proficiency with iRise products.

A big “Thank You” to all of our presenters, customers and partners who attended one of the User Group meetings. The iRise team greatly appreciates your energy, enthusiasm and willingness to share ideas with other attendees.

For those who were not able to attend one of our meetings, we’ve got you covered. We will be posting videos of each key note and customer case study, along with a copy of each presentation, on the iRise website very shortly. You can also get a brief summary of each meeting on the iRise Blog
  Press Coverage
How do you bridge the communications gap between developers and users?

Try a visual approach! Eric Knorr, the editor in chief of InfoWorld, has written an interesting blog post on visualization and iRise. "At a certain point, some projects make developers want to cry in frustration: "Just tell me what you want!" That's because the business side's inability to articulate how applications should work remains the biggest obstacle to building apps in-house. No wonder. Nothing is more tedious than creating a requirements document in the old-fashioned waterfall model, where every application twist and turn and exception must be detailed in mind-numbing prose up front. Most organizations now use more agile methods, with multiple cycles of prototypes and business-side feedback -- yet businesspeople still have trouble expressing their needs in sufficient detail, resulting in too many cycles."

  Customer Webinar
HAWORTH Webinar Now Available: "Creating the Agency Within"

The October Webinar featuring Brad Ruiter of HAWORTH, INC. is now online and available for viewing. The landscape of web and software development in corporate environments is often complex and many times a siloed effort. In this web seminar we look at how to bridge the gaps between marketing and development organizations using visualization to speed the delivery of business applications by providing new cohesive levels of understanding and rapid developer adoption. In this session we'll discover how the "agency within" model can be successfully implemented with visualization bridging normally siloed teams and creating new and productive workflows. Topics covered will include: How Haworth achieved a 50% shorter requirements cycle along with 50% cost savings...

   iRise Product News
iRise Settles Patent Infringement Lawsuit Against Axure Software Solutions

Court finds that Axure infringes iRise’s patent; parties reach settlement
The United States District Court for the Central District of California recently found that Axure Software Solutions, Inc. (Axure) infringes multiple claims of one of iRise’s patents. The Court also denied Axure’s motion for a finding that iRise’s patent is invalid, leading to a swift settlement of the dispute between the parties.

iRise filed the patent infringement lawsuit in June of 2008, asserting that Axure’s RP Pro product infringes several claims of a patent issued to iRise in early 2008. iRise’s patent concerns several features related to managing software requirements in the context of a software visualization. iRise was earlier awarded another patent in the software visualization space, and iRise has several patent applications pending in the US, Canada, and Europe.

“The court’s finding of infringement was significant in enabling us to reach a favorable settlement for iRise,” said Maurice Martin, President, COO, and founder of iRise. “iRise created the enterprise visualization space and invested heavily in innovation to drive our growth. We will continue to do so, and we will also actively defend our patented intellectual property.”

   iRise Product Training
New iRise Training Course Dates Announced

iRise training classes are designed to empower stakeholders and users with the knowledge and experience to quickly become proficient with iRise products. Below is the upcoming training schedule. You’ll receive your iRise Experienced Certificate upon completion.

DATE CLASS LOCATION COST REGISTRATION
11/17-11/18 iRise Experienced Atlanta, GA $995 Register
12/10-12/11 iRise Experienced Virtual Class - Online $595 Register
12/15-12/16 iRise Experienced Chicago, Il $995 Register
12/22-12/23 iRise Experienced Virtual Class - Online $595 Register
12/29-12/30 iRise Experienced Virtual Class - Online $595 Register

Discounts available. To learn more about iRise training classes: Click Here

   October Newsletter Contest Details
CONTEST QUESTIONS:

1. In the article on Allied North America Insurance, Lauren Saverino says: “Using the visualization as a guide, our development team had _______."? (fill in the blank)

2. What year was the iRise patent issued in (hint: it's mentioned in the Axure lawsuit section)

3. What topic does the id8 video featured in the "What Can You Do With iRise" section cover?

4. In the HAWORTH webinar described in this newsletter, it will describe how they achieved a "__________" (fill in the blank)

CLICK HERE to submit your answers (sends email to dci@irise.com). One reader who answers all four questions correctly will be chosen at random as the winner. Answers must be submitted by November 14th. Winner will be notified by November 20th. Good luck!

 
  
To celebrate the re-launch of the iRise newsletter, we're giving away an 8gb iPod Touch this month to one lucky reader. All you have to do is send us the answers to the four questions listed at the bottom of the newsletter. The answers can be found in this edition of Visualize, and the associated links.


Scroll down to the bottom of this newsletter to find the questions. Your answers must be submitted by November 14th. One entry per person. Good luck!

 
The iRise Download Center is your one stop shop for iRise related videos. They include webcasts, product walk throughs, customer testimonials, event highlight reels, funny YouTube clips and more.

Disciplined Innovation for Business Value

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Disciplined Innovation is at the heart of today's competitive advantage. The presentation given by Guido Sacchi, CIO & SVP of CompuCredit, will focus on balancing the key ingredients of idea generation with execution, including the challenges that present themselves along the way and some practical solutions to succeed in the innovation arena.

Introduction to iRise
Learn iRise
Download iRise
    


RAPID ENTERPRISE MODELING
With iRise the possibilities are endless. Our good friends over at id8 have some particularly cool examples, including Floating Navigation. This example how smaller pieces of enterprise systems can be very quickly modeled without having to build a large asset library.

Watch the video.