Sentences

This document is based on the presentation delivered by Flying Start Computing Ltd. at the launch of Sentences in London, October 2000.

Background

IT development comprises two broad areas - Enterprise-wide strategic systems, and Departmental, or tactical, systems.

At the enterprise level, systems often achieve a high level of stability with maintenance work delivering incremental changes. However, these systems must be increasingly web-enabled, both to provide customer facing systems and for the benefit of staff, utilising intranets, or the internet for teleworkers or mobile sales staff.

Tactical systems, by contrast, are often more volatile; having to react rapidly to the changing business environment. The enterprise systems are not flexible enough to cater for the departmental level needs. IT development schedules cannot always keep pace with the changing requirements, so users may feel the need to take matters into their own hands, leading to a proliferation of spreadsheets and Access databases across the business that duplicate corporate data. As the enterprise systems evolve, the departmental requirements are addressed, but often by the time that the enterprise solution is implemented the business has moved on and the requirements have changed. The departmental databases then start to reappear again.

Increasingly, the expectation is that IT should be able to deliver these tactical needs, but due to the development overhead inherent with relational databases bottlenecks often occur and users resort to using spreadsheets or Access again.

In meeting these expectations there is the dilema: do you push the boundaries of your existing tools or adopt new ones? Either way, there are potential problems. For example, if it is decided to meet the new challenges using the existing tools, what if, half way through the project, it is discovered that they cannot deliver? Alternatively, if new tools are adopted, how long will it take to get up to speed, and can it be done within the project timeframe?

Also, the business demands that IT should deliver in ever decreasing time scales, resulting in ever increasing pressures.

The Product

As it stands now, Sentences enables clients to react quickly to the demands of their evolving business environment by giving them a method of delivering tactical systems far quicker than ever before.

In so doing, control of the corporate database ‘assets’ is retained within the IT function, rather than in disparate departmental databases. At the same time, it also allows business users to ‘own’ the data by extending and enriching the corporate databases to their own specific requirements.

It allows quicker and demonstrably more accurate business modelling - the real world is not always laid out as a series of tables with columns and rows - and instant prototyping, with developers being able to sit down with end users and create a schema on the fly.

As the product develops, skills will be able to be utilised at enterprise level, for instance with on-line transaction processing.

Benefits for Partners

Why should consultancies or ISV’s use Sentences?
Using a new development tool increases risk. Assistance may be desirable for initial projects to ensure success. Typically such assistance may include initial training and mentoring of staff.

There will be a market for hosting databases for clients who do not wish to maintain a Web infrastructure. Services will be required for integrating the new sentences applications with existing databases - either migrating data from the legacy databases into Sentences of exporting the updated data back again.

The product comes with basic data types. There will be a need for more specific types, such as Credit card number or Post/Zip code, where there is a benefit in having some specialised validation or formatting applied to the data.

Why choose it?

Flying Start Computing Ltd chose to investigate Sentences because its creators have existing highly successful, and award winning, tools we use and like, which are based on sound principles. They create reliable and robust applications. Users of Advantage 2E and Advantage Plex are often passionate about the tools.

Sentences is different from any other tool we have come across, yet it complements our existing skills.

We have had a very positive response from our existing clients, both within IT and business users. They felt it was intuitive and could immediately see potential benefits.

Please feel free to request more information, or a product demonstration.

Sentences is a trademark of Lazy Software. Advantage Plex and Advantage 2E are trademarks of Computer Associates.

Related Links

Lazy Software

Sentences

Associative Model of Data