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Neil McAllister at InfoWorld wrote an interesting article recently that proclaims that “Coders Days are Numbered.” In the article Neil argues that programmers need to become much better communicators, especially in a bear economy.
From the InforWorld article:
“In 2009, software development managers shouldn’t be sifting through resumes choked with acronyms and lists of technologies. Software development doesn’t need more typists, secretaries, intermediaries, or middle managers. What it needs are more skilled, engaged, communicative, responsive, assertive developer-analysts — the kind who can understand, influence, and guide development efforts, rather than simply taking dictation. The shrinking economy makes this need ever more acute.”
At iRise we agree. IT organizations at all levels need to communicate better with business people. The old view of IT purely as a service organization simply won’t work in the 21st century. IT leaders and business must now work in a collaborative partnership toward a common goal: modernizing business systems and driving efficiency - fast. And to get these projects done successfully will require high degrees of communication. The IT organizations (and by inference the companies) that do this the best will be well positioned for when the economy recovers and we can start talking about innovation again.�
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Modernizing legacy systems is the top priority for most IT organizations, according to a recent survey conducted by Forrester Research. From the Forrester press release:
The survey of more than 2,200 IT executives and technology decision-makers in North America and Europe is Forrester’s largest annual study of software spending and adoption trends for both enterprises and small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) and is part of Forrester’s Business Data Services (BDS) series. BDS provides an extensive data set for B2B Market Research professionals’ go-to-market strategy assessments.
“The costs of operating monolithic legacy applications makes them unsustainable, and these survey results show that firms are seeking efficient ways to modernize,” said Jean-Pierre Garbani, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester. “Companies are willing to adapt their business processes to cheaper packaged software solutions rather than wait for custom applications. Automation is the key to IT’s future.”
“By freeing up money from software budgets, IT departments will be able to support more innovative projects across their organizations,” added R “Ray” Wang, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester. “Right now, every bit of competitive advantage can help, so focusing on activities that cut overall operations costs or develop better customer offerings is paramount.”
Updating key legacy applications was cited as the top initiative for both enterprises and SMBs at 64 percent and 55 percent, respectively. More than one-quarter of enterprises and more than one-fifth of SMBs said that updating and modernizing key legacy applications is very important. Top-line overviews of the full survey responses are available to Forrester RoleViewTM clients. Subscribers to Forrester’s Business Data Services receive more detailed data and access to unlimited custom data cuts. Other key highlights of the survey include:
- Software budgets will hold relatively steady. Enterprises allocated 16 percent of their IT operating budgets toward expensed software costs in 2008 and plan to allocate 17 percent over the next year. SMBs allocated 19 percent toward expensed software costs in 2008 and plan to allocate 19 percent in the next 12 months.
- Reducing IT costs and improving integration are top goals. Eighty-one percent of enterprises consider reducing IT costs to be an important goal, with improving integration between applications not too far behind at 77 percent. Seventy-one percent of SMBs consider improving integration to be important, with reducing IT costs and using information technologies to increase innovation next.
- Software-as-a-service (SaaS) concerns and barriers have diminished. Compared with 2008, the 2009 landscape for SaaS is looking brighter, but there are still some bumps along the road to adoption. Currently, at 31 percent, security concerns are the most commonly cited reason why enterprises aren’t interested in SaaS. At 39 percent, total ownership costs represent the top concern for SMBs that aren’t interested in SaaS.
- Packaged applications are preferred. When implementing a major application, a packaged application or application modules are the most preferred deployment options for 33 percent of enterprises and 45 percent of SMBs. The next preferred option for both is a tailored solution assembled from existing custom and packaged application modules. Few firms prefer to turn to SaaS or a hosted solution.
“The State Of Enterprise Software: 2009″ report is currently available to Forrester RoleView clients and can be purchased directly at http://www.forrester.com/go?docid=54466. “The State Of SMB Software: 2009″ report is currently available to Forrester RoleView clients and can be purchased directly at http://www.forrester.com/go?docid=54556.
At iRise we are seeing much the same trend. Often these projects also involve rationalizing a large number of legacy applications into a small set of reference implementations. Visualization is turning out to be the key strategy to reduce cost, risk and time on these projects. Businesses MUST invest in visualizing modernization projects before they invest in expensive coding; it just makes sense.
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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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The Standish Group just released the summary version of their 2009 CHAOS Report that tracks project failure rates across a broad range of companies and industries. From their press release:
“This year’s results show a marked decrease in project success rates, with 32% of all projects succeeding which are delivered on time, on budget, with required features and functions” says Jim Johnson, chairman of The Standish Group, “44% were challenged which are late, over budget, and/or with less than the required features and functions and 24% failed which are cancelled prior to completion or delivered and never used.”
There’s only one place where failing 68% of the time means you are a hero: baseball. If you’re batting average is over .300, you’re earning a fat paycheck in Major League Baseball. But in the software development world, batting .320 is a dismal number. Makes you wonder why more IT leaders aren’t getting replaced!
“These numbers represent a downtick in the success rates from the previous study, as well as a significant increase in the number of failures”, says Jim Crear, Standish Group CIO, “They are low point in the last five study periods. This year’s results represent the highest failure rate in over a decade”
When are companies going to stop wasting billions of dollars on failed projects? The vast majority of this waste is completely avoidable; simply get the right business needs (requirements) understood early in the process.
When the design of physical products moved from drafting boards to CAD, 3D visualization and modeling tools, the issues of failure due to poor requrements disappeared. It’s time the software industry took a page from that lesson book and did the same.
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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 partner OneSpring has updated their popular “SimDK for iPhones” and graciously allowed us to post the new iDoc as “iRise for iPhone” for download on the iRise site. This iDoc gives iPhone developers the ability to visualize iPhone applications early in the process. Functions simulated include the ability to quickly prototype the look, feel and behavior of iPhone applications, including screen transitions, typing and sliding.
To download the free iRise for iPhones iDoc, click here.
iRise for iPhones is a complete toolkit for the design of custom iPhone applications. It was built using visual elements and artifacts directly from Apple’s SDK, to which only approved Apple developers have access, thus allowing business analysts and interface designers who do not have access to Apple’s SDK to model app behavior early in the process.
iRise for iPhones offers a template guide that matches the form factor of the iPhone to help ensure designs can be accurately reproduced with the Apple SDK. iRise for iPhones includes:
o iPhone iDoc visualization template with guides;
o Menu icons w/ buttons;
o Custom button template;
o Slider and button action behaviors; and,
o Multi-touch actions.
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We just posted a new iRise iDoc for free download that contains 1,000 16×16 icons for use in iRise visualizations. Since all of the icons are maintained in a datasheet, you can easily add your own. Searching and tagging make it easy and fast to find the icon you need. Import the iDoc to your Definition Center so everyone can use it. To get the free iDoc, click here.
NOTE: This iDoc contains icons and other images created by Mark James and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/. Your use of any of these icons and images is governed by that agreement. Additional information is available here: http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/. This iDoc and any of its content is provided AS-IS. By downloading this iDoc you acknowledge and agree that neither iRise nor any iRise licensor makes any warranty whatsoever regarding this iDoc or any of its content, and iRise and its licensors hereby disclaim all implied warranties, including without limitation any implied warranty of non-infringement.
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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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For people just getting started with iRise, or for those who would just like to move on to more advanced topics, iRise held a web seminar called “Don’t Reinvent the Wheel: Accelerating Visualization with Asset Libraries,” with Michael Terrett, Co-Founder and Principal of id8. In this web seminar, Michael conducted 5 demonstrations as he spoke about the use of asset libraries as a strategy to speed up visualization projects that share common components. An asset library is an inventory of masters and templates from previous projects that you can draw upon to quickly model an application. Reusable definition assets stored in an iRise asset library enable you to drag and drop previously defined components on to multiple pages in your visualization. During the web seminar, Michael demonstrated:
- Importing Assets
- Page Building with Assets
- Custom Functionality Assets
- Business Logic Assets
- Adding to Asset Library
Michael also explained how current and future users of iRise can apply consistent designs, reuse functionality, and can integrate business logic through asset libraries.
The best part about this web seminar was that the audience had a chance to see him use iRise as he edited pages using asset libraries and showed the finished simulations.
Michael’s important advice to the audience was to, “Take the time to start with an asset library.” Reusability will turn out to be invaluable for follow-on projects.
To learn more about the importance of asset libraries, you can watch Michael Terrett’s demos for free: Don’t Reinvent the Wheel: Accelerating Visualization with Asset Libraries or download the asset library example.
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PRESS RELEASE ::
Web development & consulting firm joins iRise Alliance Partner program
iRise, the world’s leading visualization solutions company, today announced that RIIS (Research Into Internet Systems), a Detroit-based custom Web development firm has posted a record 400% growth in its business in 2008 due largely to the use of iRise visualization. RIIS focuses on building custom Web solutions for growing companies and has adopted visualization from iRise as a core competency to drive increased sales and improved client relationships. RIIS has also joined the iRise Alliance Partner program and will partner with iRise on application development projects in the region.
“The growth in our business has been dramatic and much of it can be directly related to our ability to communicate more effectively with our clients using iRise,” said Godfrey Nolan, founder and president of RIIS. “Visualization is a game changer for consulting firms that now have the ability to build stronger relationships with clients starting with proposal pursuits and continuing right thorough successful delivery.”
Some of the projects that RIIS has been successful delivering using visualization include:
- the development of a new, Web-based insurance tracking system that was prototyped in iRise and is now being developed;
- Java development for an interactive marketing agency;
- a variety of projects for a global telecom provider, including the development of a new eCommerce portal; and
- migrating law enforcement agencies from legacy systems onto a suite of Web-based records management tools.
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