via MillenialMedia

Interesting study from MilleniaMedia.

Some “facts & figures” concerning the focus of mobile application development platform.

Developer & Publisher snapshot

cross-posted on didier beck blog

via ReadWriteMobile

ReadWriteMobile is publishing an interesting post about the coming and emerging 10 Mobile Trends for 2011 based on a Forrester Research study. Some of them seem to be relevant also for us at Innoveo:

2) 2011 is the Year of the "Dumb" Smartphone User

Smartphones will become more affordable, thanks to handset subsidies. And these new users will be less engaged and active than smartphone early adopters. Forrester expects they'll download fewer apps on average, but will consume more mobile media thanks to consumer education and convenience provided by the phones.

Despite the fact that these former "dumb phone" users may download fewer apps than early adopters, the overall app forecast is still good. In fact, Gartner also just released a report that stated mobile app store revenue will pass $15 billion in 2011.

3) The Mobile Fragmentation Problem will Continue

Forrester says it expects fragmentation to continue, but it's not just referring to the multiple variations of a single OS. It means that some customers have smartphones, some have feature phones, some use apps, some use SMS, plus there are multiple OS's in existence, in multiple versions, with multiple screen sizes and there are a higher number of devices out there. In short: fragmentation. The costs of porting, maintaining and promoting apps will remain high.

4) The "Apps vs. Internet" Debate Will Continue...to be Irrelevant

Says Forrester, it's not a question of "either/or" when it comes to a choice between apps vs. the mobile Web, but both. Frequent and intense users of services like banking and brokerage will want curated experiences in the form of apps, but the Internet will remain the fallback for more occasional information and needs.

8) Companies will Invest First in Convenient Services for Consumers

Forrester says that mobile product and service professionals, particularly in the travel industry, will invest first to keep their most lucrative customers happy. And in the hierarchy of benefits that mobile offers - revenue generation, cost savings and convenience - convenience will reign during 2011.

10) "Mobile" Will Mean More than Mobile Phones

Consumer adoption of tablets, eReaders, portable media devices and other mobile products has grown in 2010 and this will continue in 2011. Apps and services will need to work across devices and consumers will want ubiquitous access to content and services.  This will force service providers to sync content via the cloud to maintain a consistent experience across platforms.

cross-posted on didier beck blog

After the start of Carlos on December 16, 2010, we are again very proud and happy to be able to announce that David Wilson, our new Senior Solution Architect, has started to work at Innoveo yesterday!

David has a Bachelor of Science from the Edinburgh University, and is bringing with him 25 years of IT experience in the fields of Software development, engineering and architecture, consulting, and project management. He knows also the Insurance industry quite well, as he was working as a consultant for Winterthur, Zurich, and ZurichRe in the past.

David (in the middle of the picture) at our recent Innoveo X’Mas Event 2010 with Carlos, Nestor, Roy, Oli and Robert).

 

We are also very happy to welcome our first “English native” speaker, as David is Swiss and … Scottish!

cross-posted on the didier beck blog

via Judith Hurwitz (first and second articles)

As usual, very interesting feed for thoughts coming from Judith.

Some abstracts:

The definition of an application is changing. The traditional view that the packaged application is hermetically sealed is going away. More of the new packaged applications will be based on service orientation based on best practices. These applications will be parameter-driven so that they can be changed in real time. And yes, Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) didn’t die after all.

Exactly what we are doing at Innoveo with our product Innoveo Skye since years!

Managing end points will be one of the key technology drivers in 2011. Smart phones, sensors, and tablet computers are refining what computing means. It will drive the requirement for a new approach to role and process based security.

Totally agree, we are working on that also at Innoveo. Cannot disclose yet.

Cloud computing moves to the front office. Two years ago IT and business leaders saw cloud computing as a way to improve back office efficiency. This is beginning to change. With the flexibility of cloud computing, management is now looking at the potential for to quickly innovate business processes that touch partners and customers.

Also something we feel coming out of the market and as new business need. Why not working on that too ;-)

cross-posted on didier beck blog

We are very happy and proud to be able to inform you all that we have hired Carlos Prieto Cañal, our new Senior Solution Architect. Today is the first day of Carlos at Innoveo!

Carlos has a Master Degree in Computer Engineering of the University of Oviedo/Spain, with a Master Thesis pending in Artificial Intelligence. One of his publication:
Hybridizing a Genetic Algorithm with Local Search and Heuristic Seeding

Carlos is also a SUN Certified Java Programmer 6, and has a Master in J2EE Applications development from SUN.

He was working for CSC (Gijon, Spain) in the last 4 years, where he could, among others, acquire knowledge of the Insurance market while he was involved in an international project developed for a major Insurance company based in Swindon/UK during 2 years.

Carlos (middle right of the picture) at our recent Innoveo X’Mas Event 2010 (I will come back to that ;) with Andrea, Nestor, Laurent and Cédric.

Quite a long time that we haven’t got colleagues from Spain in our Team, so it’s a great pleasure to increase also our “internationality” again!

cross-posted on the didier beck’s blog

Yes, already 3 years that we have founded Innoveo!

That was such a dense period, with so many experiences, wow.

As we are now used to, we have celebrated this special day with a good lunch near Zurich. Very good time indeed :-)

Warm thanks to the whole Innoveo team for making all this possible!

Cross-posted on the Didier Beck Weblog

We are searching for an excellent and motivated Software Engineer, with a focus on Java and Web Development, to support us in the development of our standard Software product -Innoveo Skye- at our office in Zurich, Switzerland. Some more information:

• Web technology: (X)HTML, CSS, AJAX, JSF, jQuery
• Basis technology: J2EE, Spring, XML & SOAP, Portal
• Development: Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA, Subversion, Maven, Tomcat, TeamCity, TDD, BDD, Scrum/XP
• Languages: English and German

More information in this pdf (in German).

Do not hesitate to contact me if you need more information. And to spread the news!

Thanks in advance ;-)

Cross-posted on didier beck blog.

As you may know, Oli (our VP Product at Innoveo) and myself participated last week to the 2nd "Lean, Agile & Scrum" Conference in Zurich, also called LAS 2010.

The topic this year: From the Scrum project to lean enterprise.

Interesting, isn’t it?

Summary

• For me the clear highlight of the day was the presentation of Mary Poppendieck (she has written the first book about Lean development in the Software industry with her husband) – The tyranny of "The Plan" (presentation here). She explained almost all principles and bases that led to the creation of the Scrum methodology. Very convincing ;-)
• I've heard now for three times quite in a row that experienced companies using Scrum are implementing very strictly the Scrum frame (no adaptation and/or tinkering), but are very careful with other Scrum best practices and lessons learnt that cannot be always replicated.
• Again, we have heard very often how far it is absolutely central to have the software engineering and automatization parts under control by introducing such kind of agile approach. What they call "software craftsmanship".
• All were also confirming how long it takes to transform deeply a company ;-)
• Some speakers were explaining how far they are still struggling with Agile Software Architecture. Seems that maturity in this field is coming quite at the end of the transformation process.
• Heard also that Scrum doesn't fit well to Maintenance & Support, and that Kanban is more accurate for organizing these activities (but not enough experience yet to confirm Kanban in this field).
• Anecdote: the CTO of bbv (about 110 developers using Scrum since 5 years) said that it is not so easy to spread this kind of agile approach, as "Swiss managers like very much to command & control, which is absolutely against the aim of agile approach". Not sure that this is so particular to Switzerland actually :-)

Mary Poppendieck

 

The thinking tool called Agile

Henrik Kniberg, presentation

The illusion of a "good tool", Don't blame the tool

Good tools are helping to:

• visualize the workflow
• limit work in progress
• focus on quality
• prioritize
• empower
• support continuous improvements

Using the wrong tool vs. using the tool wrong (both have nothing to do with the tool itself)

The aim of going agile has to be linked with the vision and values of the company => be careful to solve the right problem, i.e. the root causes and not symptoms

Agile is simple but hard!

Transforming BBV into an agile company

Marcel Bauman, presentation

Why changing to agile?

• business requirements are changing a lot, customers are asking for very short projects where you can show step-by-step results, reqs are changing during the projects
• fun for people and developers
• young people are coming more and more on the market with agile teaching

Why Scrum?

• standard method, most used in Europe

Bbv favors (manifesto):

• individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• working software over comprehensive documentation
• customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• responding to a change over following a plan

Scrum works only with:

• source mgt, continuous integration, wiki, test env
• need a lot of virtual machines and processing power
• automate everything that can be automated
• remote access (VPN) for all employees
• XP as a base! => 40% of developers don't like pair programming

HR:

• no reporting on individual level, just project-level
• incentive on team-level
• pair programming interviews

The tyranny of "The Plan"

Mary Poppendieck, presentation

Key Success Factors for successful projects:

• teamwork
• deeply experienced people
• focus on key constraint
• decoupling
• cash-flow thinking

In other words:

• design the system to meet the constraints; do not derive constraints from the design
• break dependencies
• manage the workflow

Schedules based on experience are reliable. Schedules summed up from task breakdowns are guesses, hypothesis about the future.

Optimize Throughput, not utilization (coming from Queuing theory)!

• minimize the number of things in process
• minimize the size of things in process

Level the workload:

• manage workflow, not tasks
• establish a regular cadence

Limit work to capacity

• timebox, don't scopebox
• pull, don't push

Cross-posted on didier beck’s blog.

via Celent

Michel Michellod from Celent, an international strategy consultancy focused on the financial industry, has just posted a very interesting article which is very “aligned” with how we understand ourselves the current and coming insurance front-end challenges.

Some interesting strategic challenges highlighted in the post:

The direct channel requires an appropriate front end. […] This goal can be best achieved through the implementation of open and flexible front end systems facilitating interactions with potential customers, integrating modern communication tools for call center officers and allowing a high level of reactivity in terms of product, pricing and discount changes.

Communication with aggregators is key. […]  The second alternative consists in directing shoppers automatically onto the insurance online platform to perform the last step of the buying process (the effective purchase of the insurance product and its payment). This alternative requires an instantaneous transmission of customer and quote data by aggregators to insurers.

Insurers need to improve integration of affinity and bank channels. […] Insurers need to implement relevant portals allowing management and process of sophisticated insurance products.

Use brokers and agents in specific customer segments. […] I recommend insurers to implement sophisticated portals with rich functionality to provide point of differentiation.

Responding to multi-channel management. […] I believe insurers should prioritize sophisticated portals providing a single view of the customer based on service oriented architecture (SOA) with high level of automation.

As the insurance distribution landscape is changing fast and drastically, I expect this topic to be part of the European insurer’s top priorities in the coming years.

At Innoveo, we are exactly acting in this field and bringing a standard software product on the market – Innoveo Skye®– which allows insurance companies (life, non-life, health) to find an efficient, technology-proven and business-oriented answer to the different challenges raised by Celent.

Disclaimer: we were nominated by Celent as “Model Carrier” in 2007 for our effective usage of technology. See the report here.

Cross-posted on Didier Beck Weblog