iRise Brings Visualization to Speed Up Application Development

July 29, 2011 at 3:11 am · Filed under Web 2.0

The consumerization of IT is bringing two significant challenges to IT development shops as the business users gain a greater sense of empowerment. First, business users want their apps right away and will no longer tolerate traditionally long development times. Second, they want more elegant applications like those found on the Web. iRise is providing a potentially transformative technology to the enterprise application development process that addresses these two emerging needs. I spoke with Emmet Keeffe, CEO and co-founder, iRise about their offering.

iRise provides enterprise visualization software for business applications. Visualization allows business units to more effectively communicate their needs to technology teams and give everyone involved the ability to interact with and fully experience applications before they are built. This ability “test drive” applications before building can be a significant time saver in several ways.

First, iRise has made the tool simple enough that business analysts can use it themselves to create a more robust rendering of the requirements than the traditional functional specification.  This leads to faster development times and much less need to re-do off-target software. Now analysts can flip the traditional process of paper specs before mock-ups and create a functional mock-up first. Then the spec can be a more accurate and require a smaller set of documentation that simply annotates and augments the interactive visualization, which becomes the primary blueprint for developers.  Since the business analysts can do the visualization themselves and do not have to hand off the task to IT, the maddening back and forth that inevitably occurs in order to finalize business requirements is taken out of the process.

Second, iRise has taken visualization to the fullly interactive level so the need for non-functional, static screen mockups is taken off the table. Now user acceptance can be completed before the application is actually built saving significant re-work time.

Third, because of this capability is both easy and quick, modifications to functionality can be done real time in review sessions, reducing the need for cycles of meet – rework – meet again.  I have seen these cycles many times and can see the benefit of real time functional modifications. You can see a sample visulization screen below.

The approach represents a radical departure in the way software has been developed over the past thirty years so one of the challenges is getting people to change their old ways. iRise has developed training programs to help both business and IT make the transformation.

This approach has gained good traction in the market and IRise has a number of large clients such as General Motors, UPS, FedEx, Haworth, and Manpower. They have also recently signed a reseller deal with SAP. The SAP® Application Visualization software by iRise, is now a solution extension offered by SAP. This tool supports the blueprinting process by enabling implementation teams to create visuals of end-to-end solutions and functional gaps.

Emmet said there are a number of value propositions operating here. First, SAP users can how see a visualization of the out-of-the-box functionality to have a better starting point to indentify and mock up necessary customizations. They can also show how different applications will work together before starting the integration process.  In addition, they can visualize mobile apps meeting a rising need as mobile becomes more pervasive in the enterprise. Customers can also build a library of screen designs that contain company specific standards and that can be re-used as needed. You can see a sample iPad simulation screen below.

I have suffered through a number of overly long enterprise application development efforts using the old school approach and I can certainly see the benefits of visualization for application development. There is also an additional side benefit where I also have direct experience. In the old days, the training people had to wait until the final version of the software was done before they could start, delaying the availability of necessary software training. Now the training can be based on the visualizations and be completed before the software is even ready.

Halogen Provides a Comprehensive and Integrated Talent Management Suite

July 27, 2011 at 12:30 pm · Filed under Web 2.0

I have covered Halogen Software before (see: Halogen – Using Transparency to Promote Accountability in HR). Processes.  They have recently launched a new module, Halogen eRecruitment, to round out their integrated suite of talent management tools. I spoke with Donna Ronayne, VP of marketing to learn about this latest move and their efforts since we last spoke.

Donna began by pointing the increasingly strategic nature of talent management. I would agree with this. She mentioned that according to PwC’s annual CEO survey managing talent has overtaken risk as top of the CEO agenda and 83 percent of the 1,200 CEOs surveyed globally plan to change their firm’s talent management strategy over the next 12 months. In addition, in companies with better talent management Bersin found 22% higher revenue per employee, McKinsey found 22% higher shareholder return, and Watson Wyatt found a 30% higher corporate valuation. These are all numbers that seem reasonable to me. I feel that companies that invest more in their people are bound to do better and it is nice to see numbers to back up this assumption.

Donna said that one of the obstacles to sound talent management has been the siloed nature of the functions that support this effort. Often recruiting, compensation, succession and learning are not linked. Part of the problem is that many of these functions have adopted their own tool sets and these tools do not link across functions. While this siloed approach does not make good business sense, it is also not surprising.

The Halogen suite is designed to address this issue. They have made performance management the hub of this integration that also includes:  appraisal, compensation, succession, learning, talent profiles, job description, and now recruitment. Each of these capabilities are integrated so they can coordinate employees efforts from recruitment through succession. For example, a job description can drive a job requisition that drives recruitment and on-boarding and then learning programs. The suite is based on HR best practices and unifies talent management strategy through performance, handling the employee lifecycle from hire to retire.

Donna said the recruitment is often isolated from the rest of the HR functions and the addition of this function to their integrated suite helps to round out their capabilities. Halogen eRecruitment includes all the features of a classic Applicant Tracking Systems, but allows recruiters to be fully integrated into all talent management processes. Halogen eRecruitment is designed from the ground up to leverage all the important integration points of a talent management suite that includes performance, learning, succession, compensation, job descriptions, talent profiles and more.  One of the features allows you to compare both internal and external candidates for a position.

The integrated nature of the suite allows for multi-tasking by managers when handling talent management functions. For example, they can work on succession planning and learning management while they are doing performance appraisals. Below you can see a sample manager’s screen with the work activities on the left and an activity stream of recent employee actions on the right. He is currently working on a job description and recruitment.

You can also easily see your performance against goals as shown in the screen below.

Each component of the system is designed for ease of use and the screens do seem intuitive to me. I can see real benefits from having an integrated approach such as the one Halogen provides. Apparently their customers do also as they have experienced 36 consecutive quarters of record growth.

JackBe Provides Real-Time Intelligence with a Focus on the Business User

July 25, 2011 at 3:43 am · Filed under Web 2.0

JackBe has been in the mashup and application development business for some time and I have covered them on several occasions. The most latest was: JackBe Moves Further into Real-Time Intelligence. What originally started as an enterprise mashup platform has now evolved into a real-time (business) intelligence platform that connects directly to live data sources and delivers information in Enterprise Apps as needed by organizations.

I spoke with Rick Pitts the new CEO at JackBe, along with John Crupi, their CTO. Rick is the former president and CEO of the North and South American regions for Business Intelligence (BI) software provider QlikTech. Prior to that he was with Compaq and SAP so he brings extensive enterprise application experience.

JackBe’s Real-Time Intelligence Solution, Presto, was recently cited by Forrester Research as a “Unified Next-Generation BI” technology. In the next generation of BI, the focus is on Real-Time BI;  what is happening right now versus going back into a data warehouse to see what happened in the past.

As Rick explained, there are other aspects to their next generation approach to BI. These also include agility, and self-service enabled by ease of use. I certainly applaud this decision. Too many old school BI tools require a team of BI experts that can get between the business user who needs answers now and the datathat offers these answers.

I asked Rick how JackBe promotes self-service. He said it is a matter of what they do and what they do not do. First, they do not try to tackle data cleansing, semantic dictionaries, and deep data dives. They are consumers of data and their mashup roots help here.  They are aligned with the business being the consumer of the data. They provide dynamic data to support immediate business decisions.

Business users can decide what data they want to look at and how they want to visualize it. JackBe offers a range of visualizations. Then the business users can assemble the right views through point and click anddrag and drop which means with no programming requirements.  They want the business user to make BI decisions on their own and not be limited by the need to use specialized staff support.  Works for me.

JackBe is also expanding its mobile capabilities for increased ease of use and great self-service. They want people to be able to easily share live apps with current data rather than frozen reports through email and other channels.

Qualcomm is one of their customers and Qualcomm has an on-premise Enterprise App Store that enables employees to create personalized dashboards that meet their specific needs. People are used to the igoogle experience and collecting their own data on the Web. The Qualcomm approach allows them to do this within a secure environment.

I like JackBe’s movement from providing an enabling technology (mashups) to offering a business outcome (business Intelligence). Business intelligence is becoming increasingly strategic and  adding real-time capabilities and ease of  use are great pluses.

IBM Brings Cloud-based Collaboration and Other Aspects of Social Business to Government

July 21, 2011 at 9:03 am · Filed under Web 2.0

Today IBM introduced a new set of social collaboration offerings on the IBM Federal Community Cloud. The services include the industry’s broadest capabilities for social software such as wikis, micro-blogs, staff profiles, instant messaging, web conferencing, messaging and collaboration, and email.  It also includes support for popular mobile devices including Android phones and tablets, Apple iPhone 4 and iPad, BlackBerry, and Nokia Symbian platform.

The new set of social collaboration Cloud offerings on the IBM Federal Community Cloud addresses the Obama administration’s drive to adopt a “cloud-first” policy that is designed to help the government reduce and consolidate its 2,100 data centers. The government plans to reduce that total by at least 40% by 2015. Bringing social networking capabilities to the IBM Federal Community Cloud will help federal government organizations with collaboration, generate new ideas, and increase government efficiencies. I can support that.

IBM’s social software, which is part of the new service, has a number of productivity tools including:

• Blogs allow staff to gather and prioritize community ideas, present their own ideas and learn from others.
• Communities allow people to exchange and share information with others through a web browser, instant messaging, or email software.
• File sharing and micro-blogs facilitate collaboration with dynamic networks of co-workers, partners and customers.
• Profiles allow people to find and work with others who share common interests and expertise as well as expand their social networks. Tags and social analytics technologies assist with this task.

A variety of regional government organizations, including the State of Vermont and Michigan Municipal League, have recently adopted IBM cloud collaboration services in order to transform their business processes and increase efficiencies.  In keeping with its cost cutting initiative, the State of Vermont is lowering costs, reducing paper consumption and increasing efficiency in its Department of Information and Innovation (DII). The DII is transforming the way it processes vendor contracts with IBM cloud services and Silanis’ electronic signature technology.

IBM is now providing tools for organizations to collaborate both on premise and in the cloud. For example, the U.S. Army is already using a variety of on premise IBM collaboration tools including electronic IBM Forms that help reduce the time, costs, and problems inherent to paper-based forms processes to help speed process automation.  Additionally, several Federal government organizations use IBM services that provide cloud and data center capabilities to build, manage, operate and analyze their computing environments.

The Rise in Mobile Apps Puts New Demands on Developers

July 12, 2011 at 5:28 pm · Filed under Web 2.0

Mobile is on the rise within the enterprise and this creates the need for more efficient mobile application development. This is an increasingly important topic as two-thirds of the information workforce already works remotely, according to Forrester data. With the adoption of tablets such as the iPad and the proliferation of smart phones in the enterprise, that number figures to grow significantly. It is a matter of when, not whether, that mobile devices exceed desktops.

I recently spoke with Ed Schwarz, VP of Engineering at Gorilla Logic, a provider of enterprise application development services and creators of open source test tools for mobile and rich Internet applications about this market. To address some of the market needs, Ed was one of the creators of the open source automated testing tool “FoneMonkey” for the Apple iPhone and iPad.

I am familiar with the benefits of automated testing in the enterprise app world so it is nice to see it brought into the mobile app space. Ed said they saw the need for such testing tools as Gorilla Logic developed apps through Agile processes for its clients. To need this need, they decided to develop the tool set, FoneMonkey 5, themselves. As they are a development firm rather than a product firm, they then decided to make it available as a free Open Source app as both a service to the market and a demonstration of their capabilities. This makes good sense. They do provide training and support services.

FoneMonkey 5 provides end-to-end automated testing to help both developers and QA teams. It has robust script recording and playback and works with both the iPhone and iPad. It can work in both desktop simulators and the actual mobile devices.  Tools like this can greater simply and speed up the development process.

I asked Ed about the impact of Apple’s iOS on the market. He said that until recently Apple was the standard for mobile apps. A year ago, developing a mobile app generally meant creating an iPhone app but the rest of the market is beginning to catch up.

We also discussed how Apple’s iOS is different from other operating systems such as Android or old school Microsoft tools.  Ed said that Apple decided to put the user first and support apps that were fast. This makes it harder for developers. However, it makes sense as Apple has always put the user’s experience in a prime position.

I asked Ed if enterprises were starting to develop mobile apps for use within the enterprise. Ed said that the main focus of enterprise mobile apps has been on monitoring and alerts because of the interface limitations. Sample use cases are industrial controls such as monitoring battery equipment or IT controls such as Web site stats.  With the introduction of the iPad there are now possibilities for more complex apps over the initial smart phone apps and enterprise are starting to take advantage of this new capability.

The Social Media ProBook Offers Excellent Advice to Marketeers

July 6, 2011 at 3:01 am · Filed under Web 2.0

Eloqua and JESS3 have published The Social Media ProBook. It is a free (42 page) e-book written for professionals who are looking to better manage and measure their social marketing efforts.  The book was written by a cross-section of twenty social marketers from brands and agency, analysts, and social support professionals across both B2B and B2C industries including: Scott Monty (head of social at Ford), Jamie Grenney (head of social at Salesforce.com), Frank Eliason (head of social Citi, formerly Comcast, Ekaterina Walker and Bryan Rhoads (social strategists with Intel), Liz Philips (community for HP), Jeremiah Owyang (Altimeter analyst), and Steve Rubel & David Armano (digital leaders at Edelman).

The book includes Google+ and much of what went before it. Some of the questions it addresses are: how to optimize your Facebook newsfeed to be seen by as many fans as possible, how to scale your social media program globally, how to measure something other than “Likes,” how to create successful infographics, and how to build relationships with influencers.

Jesse Thomas starts by looking at some of earlier tools. Some continue to prosper such as Flickr and StumbleUpon. Others have fallen on harder times such as FriendFeed, MySpace, Google Wave, Digg, and others are somewhere inbetween such as delicious.

Brad Cohen looks at new entrants such as Posterous, Groupon, and Google+. He writes. “Google+ is a new social network that promises to make it easier for members to share information to “circles” of friends to whom that update is relevant.  Whether that differentiator is sufficient to lure people away from the familiar blue halls of Facebook is, of course, anyone’s guess. Google seems serious this time. But history is not on their side.” I have heard many positive reacts to Google+ so maybe they will succeed this time.

Ekaterina Walter and Bryan Rhoads provide Eight Critical Elements  of Scaling Your  Social Media  Strategy Globally.  There are interviews providing a “day in the life” with Scott Monty of Ford, Jamie Grenney, VP of Social Media at Sealforce.com, Frank Eliason, SVP of Social for Citi, and Adam Singer, Social Media Practice Director for Lewis PR and editor of digital marketing blog, The Future Buzz. Leslie Bradshaw provides some useful usage guidelines for such tools as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

There is much but this gives you a sense of what they are providing in the very useful book.