CompuCredit Corp. is using specialized project management and simulation software to accelerate the upgrade of a bill payment Web site for one of its card products.
Guido Sacchi, the Atlanta subprime credit card marketer's chief information officer, said in an interview last week that the project will be completed about 30% faster than similar ones his company has done in the past. The site is undergoing final testing, and he expects it to go live this month.
The site will include cardholder account management, electronic bill payment, and presentment features that are more advanced than what CompuCredit has offered in the past. Though such features are now fairly common in the industry, the company said that its use of the specialized development tools is not.
The software, from iRise Inc. of El Segundo, Calif., uses automated tools to help people precisely define their requirements, so the developers can write code that meets their needs. iRise is expected to announce its deal with CompuCredit today.
Mr. Sacchi said he plans to use the software in the development of all future Web sites. "The business case is based on how long it took us to develop the Web site."
For this project, the company cut the development time to six to eight weeks, compared to 10 to 12 weeks for previous site redesigns.
"CompuCredit has always thrived on moving fast," he said. "Speed to market is one of its competitive advantages."
The Stamford, Conn., research and consulting firm Gartner Inc., predicts that the market for such "requirement definition management" tools will be $400 million by 2008. The tools have the potential to reduce application development costs by 30%, Gartner says.
Large companies such as International Business Machines Corp. and Borland Software Corp. provide such tools, and so do numerous less-known vendors, Gartner said.
The iRise software helps a company's business team collaborate with the information technology staff by producing working models of a project.
When business people explain their needs in a meeting with the IT staff, the process is "very open to misunderstandings," Mr. Sacchi said.
Also, a lot of time is taken up "by the initial phase: requirements-gathering," he said. In many projects, "close to half of the time was before we even started doing any coding."
With the new tools, "you can pretty quickly build a simulation with the look and feel" of a project's final version, incorporating the workflows that occur behind the scenes.
Mr. Sacchi said the software is expected to cut the requirement-gathering stage for his company's projects in half.
"The visualization approach brings immediate benefits. You can see the look and feel immediately," he said. "What the users get is a lot closer to what they had in mind."
Before using the software on a customer-facing project, CompuCredit pilot tested the iRise software on two internal development projects.
Though he had quickly bought into the concept of using a simulation tool, "I was surprised by the level of acceptance" in his company's business staff, he said. The previous process "was clearly a pain point for them."
Emmet B. Keeffe 3d, the chief executive of iRise, said 100 companies, many of them in financial services, are using its software. His company's Web site lists 26 financial services firms as customers - including Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., and Wells Fargo & Co. - making the industry by far the largest user of its software.
SunTrust Banks Inc. of Atlanta used the software to move online banking customers of National Commerce Financial Corp. to its system after acquiring the Memphis company in 2004.
Mr. Sacchi said the software's workflow features would help in future projects by making the business requirements reusable.
"We can redeploy the same concept to a different brand," he said. "The workflow is the same. The look and feel is different."
