iRise for SAP®

Yesterday I had a meeting with our SAP Client Engagement Manager. Besides being 15 mins late (not your fault Michael) it actually turned out to be a great meeting because I was introduced to iRise.

At first I didn’t take much notice of iRise as I  just thought that Michael was doing his mandatory sales pitch. I took a note of the name and brushed it aside, to be “looked at” at another point in time – file13.

Michael was quite animated about iRise, so last night I decided to have a quick look at the website and see what the fuss was all about…. an hour later, I realised why he came across like a kid with new toy.

iRise Summary:

iRise is a visualisation tool that allows you to build (no coding required) a prototype interface for your up and coming projects. It’s all drag and drop orientated with predefined templates and objects that you just drag off the tool bars and into your work area.

Click here for video presentation overview of iRise. (sorry, they’ve got some funky flash embedding, so I can’t stream it from here)

Benefits:

Think back to a project where your primary stake holder is giving you all the detail of what they want and you’re sitting there trying to sketch it all out on a piece of paper. You spend a few hours getting the visual layout nailed down, head over to your Dev team and presto 2 weeks later you present the initial draft to the client.

Low and behold, there was a serious “miss-communication” somewhere along the line  and you’ve now lost 2 – 4 weeks. - Major setback !!

With iRise you could have knocked up a visual representation of the project and have it approved within a few hours. This will save you shed loads of time and effort!!

Final Thoughts:

One thing I think would work extremely well is for iRise to somehow be linked into StreamWork , now THAT would be an amazing set of tools!!

Imaging this (perfect world) – You have a new project, you get everyone setup on StreamWork and create a collaborative environment for everyone to work in harmony. Everyone meets online / video conf and gets all the nitty gritty done. Create your mock-up designs in iRise and present to all via StreamWork, everything gets signed off and you kick your deadlines ass by 2 weeks - Job done!!

As you may have gathered, I think this is a great tool!! I can’t see it being used a lot in an end user environment as they will not have continuous project work where re-design and implementation is required. The next major leap forward for iRise would be for them to release it as a set of web tools and not a stand alone client.