Rising to Model a More Complex Reality

For any organization or IT professional involved in applicationdevelopment, few things are more costly and frustrating than deliveringto users exactly what you thought they’d agreed they wanted—only tofind their reaction lukewarm, or even negative. An Aug. 28announcement by Capgemini U.S.and iRise highlights the potentialof simulation tools to close the gap between a developer’s technicalunderstanding and an end user’s subjective impression of what anapplication is supposed to do, and of how the experience of using it issupposed to look and feel.

I’ve previously spent time with the 3.0 version of the iRisetechnology, then called iRise Application Simulator, and found it acompelling improvement upon other efforts I’ve seen to involve endusers and accelerate the understanding of developers. The problems thatI’ve identified in past attempts to do this have never quite coveredthe ground, as I then observed, of “laying out screens, describingtheir connections and testing their functions using actual datawithout ever writing code or even anything that looks like code—quicklyenough and clearly enough that different ideas can be tested andoversights rapidly identified.”

The iRise tool enabled me to express every element of an imaginedapplication: When I thought I’d found something it couldn’t do, itturned out that I had actually discovered a discrepancy between mydatabase model and my application design. In a real-life developmentsituation, this could have saved a lot of money that might otherwisehave been spent pavinga blind alley.

I spoke in advance of the Aug. 28 announcement with CoreyGlickman, senior manager in the Consulting Services Practice forCapgemini: “We’re looking at how to increase user adoption of solutionswhile at the same time lowering risk of development and delivery,” hesaid, adding, “There are many complex things to put together. It startsout with a business mission and an ROI for that process; it gets overto the IT world, where they’re left with very large challenges: Thereare tensions. It’s hard to pull off.”

Read the full story on eWEEK.com: Rising to New Tasks’ Challenges