Rising to Model a More Complex Reality

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

I’ve previously spent time with the 3.0 version of the iRise
technology, then called iRise Application Simulator, and found it a
compelling improvement upon other efforts I’ve seen to involve end
users and accelerate the understanding of developers. The problems that
I’ve identified in past attempts to do this have never quite covered
the ground, as I then observed, of “laying out screens, describing
their connections and testing their functions using actual data
without ever writing code or even anything that looks like code—quickly
enough and clearly enough that different ideas can be tested and
oversights rapidly identified.”

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

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

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