Customer Spotlight

Customer Spotlight: Visualize to Modernize

by John P. Philbin, Ph.D., APR 

Why visualization is critical and relevant for today’s challenges

Strategic Collaborative Solutions, LLC has an exclusive Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business (SDVOSB) relationship with iRise to introduce and sell its technology and services to Federal clients within the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Transportation. As articulated on its web site, “iRise is an enterprise grade application definition platform used to quickly assemble working previews of business software that mimic the exact look, feel and behavior of the final product. iRise empowers stakeholders to test drive and fully interact with proposed business software before any coding which eliminates confusion about what to build, cuts project cost and accelerates delivery.”

This White Paper was developed in collaboration with Mr. Dean Terry, who is iRise’s Executive Vice President, Federal & Aerospace/Defense Sector. This paper is designed to provide the organization’s senior leadership with a general background of iRise’s visualization technology and the many benefits of employing this technology. 

iRise is being used by leading private sector companies. The distinguished list includes, but is not limited to: FedEx, Bank of America, CSC, BP, Delta Airlines and Capgemini. In the Federal sector, clients include but are not limited to: U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Department of the Treasury (IRS). The technology has been deployed across such diverse industries as Retail/Distribution, Financial Services, Energy, Automotive, Industrial/Manufacturing, Biotech/Healthcare, Telecommunications and Insurance.

An agency’s ability to respond quickly and effectively to emerging situations depends on innovation, agility and speed—all which are byproducts of employing iRise’s visualization technology.

The benefits include:

• Visual, interactive visualizations eliminate confusion, accelerating time to market;
• No confusion means no rework and lower project cost;
• Business analysts become prototyping powerhouses, freeing development resources;
• Outsourcing strategies can now be executed with low risk;
• Usability design can be moved to the front of the development process, improving adoption & cutting training costs; and,
• Downstream organizations get a head-start on test scripts, documentation & training, speeding up the delivery process. 

Discussion

Many U.S. Federal agencies have long provided leadership in the use of information technology (IT) to enhance the delivery of government services, such as healthcare delivery and benefits. 

Mission-critical government IT platforms, that in year’s past provided innovations such as the Computerized Patient Record System (CPRS), My HealtheVet, Case Management Solutions (at DHS, USAOC, & IRS) and other innovations, must be modernized and re-architected to support a user/citizen/patient centric approach, rather than organization- or facility-centric approach to managing and providing information.

This requires a new focus within the agencies on systems engineering and business architecture integration as a complement to the agencies historic capabilities for IT innovation. As a result, establishing a new balance between systems engineering and innovation, and ensuring that innovation continues to be strength of the agencies have become important challenges. This has never been more important for Federal agencies than it is today!

These challenges underlie the growing importance of the technology and practices for continued government IT leadership. The OCIO and CTO play a central role in identifying promising new IT technologies and practices, sponsoring strategic change initiatives, and facilitating on-going innovation in the agency. Many agencies have designed and are establishing an “Innovation Sandbox” to provide a new enterprise computing environment for innovators to continue their critical role in IT innovation within the agency. CIOs and CTOs at VA, DHS, DOS, IRS, Treasury, AOC, DOD, and ODNI have undertaken an exploration of visual simulation practices and technology to determine their potential for addressing challenges faced by agencies as they modernize their business and clinical systems.

Among others, we at SCS and iRise know that IT can be the essential enabler of a “Shared Space” (Innovation) ---based on “Visualization”--- that delivers dramatic improvements in communication, collaboration and innovation[1]. 

Background

Federal agencies, like the vast majority of other large enterprises, currently use narrative specifications as the basis for designing and developing software applications. That approach for communicating the needs of IT users to IT developers is suspected of being at the heart of the large IT project failure rate first reported by the Standish Group in their landmark study, The Chaos Report[2]. The tasks performed by knowledge workers—such as clinicians, border guards, and judges who are working as teams in a multitasking environment—are so complex that they overwhelm the workers’ ability to express, business analysts’ ability to describe, and developers’ ability to fully understand the pertinent IT requirements. The linear, one-dimensional way in which more routine IT applications were specified in the past is no longer sufficient. Different media and different approaches are needed.

VA, ICE, DOS, DOD, FDIC, SSA and IRS recognized this requirement and began to pilot tools and services that provide more pictorial representations of business requirements more than a year ago. The focus of these pilot efforts were on improving high-value workflows supported by legacy mainframe systems and created simulations of “to be” functionally-rich “screens” were developed and provided the basis for assessing the value of potential improvements in mission-critical systems—to support more efficient workflows for knowledge works. The pilot projects, which were all successful, demonstrated a promising approach for supporting VistA modernization at VA—for example—and using visual simulation practices and tools to better communicate business requirements. This issue continues to be a driving force for the growing demand for iRise technology and services, and its business alliance partners. Their deep expertise and experience in visual simulation and pioneering work demonstrating the value of model-driven requirements definition are specifically targeted towards continuing the progress agencies have made in this area.

A second, related issue for many agencies is in maintaining and enhancing the role of the users of IT in the design of IT—specifically designing the IT interface. Most agencies’ legacy approach to software development is not bottom-up, field development—and do not involve users (i.e., judges, agents, census-takers, etc.) as contributors to the design of software that they must use. Maintaining that focus on user-centered design in the shift to an enterprise computing approach for agency-modernized ERPs/EHRs is a significant priority for agencies. Extending user-centered design in organizations to include operators, logisticians, asset management staff and other stakeholders in designing the applications they touch. In fact, as a charter member of the Commandant’s Innovation Council in the United States Coast Guard, I distinctly remember IT solutions that were developed by operational personnel at the point of service delivery being offered up as enterprise solutions for the leadership to consider. This issue of user-centered design and effective incorporation of users as well as the agency leadership in designing the user experience is a new and important one driving goals and objectives in the drive to improve government efficiency and quality of its services for citizens and employees.

iRise and its business alliance partners—such as SCS—bring a mature enterprise visualization and simulation technology, methodology, and deep experience in user-centered design supporting several large agencies, and other 100s of F500 size organizations in the private sector clients to address these challenges and are well positioned to maintain and extend this key design practice in the federal government.

The third significant issue driving agency goals and objectives for enabling innovation and emerging insights about visual simulation is to effect fundamental change in agency enterprise IT processes and future versions of mission-critical applications. Innovative ideas, like visual simulation, model-driven requirements, and user-centered design, require incubation and the development of new capabilities and approaches to effectively integrate them into existing processes and products.

In some Federal agencies, Sandboxes, also known as “Shared Space” have been established to provide a new virtual environment for innovators to collaborate leveraging IT to solve problems and improve performance. In the new innovation environment, innovators will need tools and representations of existing IT functionality to express their ideas and collaborate on improvements. They will also need accepted business architecture integration processes for programming, planning, developing and deploying those improvements. These broader capability development requirements drive important enterprise innovation goals and objectives to enable innovation.

For example, iRise and its alliance business partners provide support for a VA Center of Excellence for Visual Modeling and through its leadership in enterprise-level collaborative team visualization, bring important capabilities to this team to address the issues faced by the agency and its constituents. Other emerging centers of excellence exist at DHS – ICE (TECS Modernization) and at Treasury – IRS.

Rapid Requirements and Solution Development

For many Federal agencies, we are confident that visualization can be employed to quickly and efficiently identify requirements and solutions to address many challenges. And, we also are confident that employing visualization technology with seasoned, business analysts who are expert iRise users[3] can (1) create clarity, (2) bring solutions to market in significantly less time, and (3) produce at least a 3X return on investment within a very limited engagement. 

For more information, please contact Dr. John P. “Pat” Philbin at jphilbin@stcoso.com.

About SCS

Strategic Collaborative Solutions is a Department of Veterans Affairs Verified (CVE) Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business Concern (SDVOSB) founded in 2007 that provides a broad portfolio of superior service and technology solutions to Federal customers. Our core values of Integrity, Respect and Commitment to Service provide a solid foundation for extraordinary support and technology offerings to our growing list of clients. Our mission is to provide superior service and transformational technical capabilities to Federal clients and those who serve the public interest by leveraging the knowledge, skills, abilities, loyalty and commitment of those who have served.

About iRise

iRise - The Ultimate Change Agent. iRise is the market leading supplier of visualization software for business applications. Visualization is a proven strategy to accelerate delivery, cut project cost, improve UI design, customer experience and enable global sourcing at a whole new level. iRise visualizations look, act and feel like the real thing, ensuring that everyone is literally on the same page.  Our products are being used today by tens of thousands of business analysts, project managers and user experience professionals at companies like

General Motors, UPS, Wachovia, Manpower, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center to quickly visualize complex business applications that are virtually indistinguishable from the final product.