This was my first iRise conference and I was not at all surprised to see the amount of people that were in attendance. For such a young product and company the foothold is mounting with an ever increasing momentum. I strongly believe that iRise is changing the software industry in much the same way that Computer Aided Design has forever changed the engineering and architectural fields. I’m glad to have discovered this product so early in its lifecycle and can only hope to continue working with such enthusiastic people, no I don’t work for iRise but I have had the enormous pleasure of meeting some truly amazing people during this short adventure.
As I promised here are the highlights of the day’s events.
Three presentations were given with much context into why a company would use iRise, how the product fits into a company’s current landscape and numerous examples of lessons learned. My presentation consisted of a case study in which iRise was used to not only define the product’s requirements but to more importantly build stakeholder support.
As expected there was a great deal of discussion around a topic that seems to have developed into two distinct camps. Low vs High Fidelity. David Singh, iRise’s Professional Services Manager addressed this topic in his Best Practices presentation. I also delved into the matter within my own presentation and here a high level summary of the discussion.
The impression I received is that David and his team are clearly in the Low Fidelity camp with all but a few rare occasions they will actually take a simulation to High Fidelity. In my personal experiences with iRise this works great for doing ideation and application flow, however since one is already going through the effort to build-out a model why not structure the model in a way the supports switching from Low to High with just a few clicks. By doing so this enables the modeler to work through product concepts and core Information Architecture practices without the distraction of visual design and functional constraints. Then when the time comes to present the simulation to executive sponsors or to perform usability studies one can then switch the model over to High Fidelity to support these efforts. Because as we all know there isn’t an executive out there that A. has the time to “imagine” what the product will look like or B. feels truly comfortable signing the check on a product that may or may not increase the bottom line. Below is diagram from my presentation that I hope will help clarify when to use the various modeling types and who the team members and stakeholders are and what touch-points they have during the lifecycle.
Another highlight from the conference was a roundtable discussion hosted by David Waker iRise’s Chief Product Evangelist. The panel consisted of industry veterans from Sony Pictures Entertainment, BEA Systems and TGW (Sprint). This session provided a lot of insightful discussion around adoption, business challenges and future direction.
So to wrap things up I want to thank the team at iRise for organizing such a valuable event and I recommend to anyone that has time to attend the next conference to do so.
Take care and check back soon as many more topics are coming soon including an update to the Wish List.
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