1989 British Design Award to 'Resolve' from Metapraxis

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 35

RESOLVE, the world's first Executive Information System, has won one of the 1989 British Design Awards. RESOLVE has been developed by the management consultancy Metapraxis, based at Kingston-on-Thames, and is written in APL*PLUS/PC.

Executive Information Systems are designed to provide directors and senior managers of large organisations with personal access to their corporate databases, and APL has played a major role in their development. Besides RESOLVE, the British Airways system, called AIMS, is also written in APL, as was one of the earlier, trail-blazing systems at Imperial Group, as described in VECTOR 1.2.

One of the main features of RESOLVE is its wide range of colour graphics formats, each carefully designed to pin-point issues of business importance. It also has the ability to provide business forecasts and to detect exceptional performance so that appropriate action can be taken before a crisis develops. All of these facilities can be called up within seconds at a Board meeting using an infra-red keypad which can be passed to whoever holds the floor.

RESOLVE was launched in Spring 1985, but since then has evolved incorporating feedback from an active client base in over seventy major organisations, including health authorities, public agencies and third-world governments, as well as retailers, manufacturing corporations, banks and insurance companies. The backbone of the development team has been provided by Martyn Adams, Mark Bassett and David Preedy, but over the years about fifteen other people within Metapraxis have also been directly involved.

Over that time, Metapraxis has grown from a company of eight employees to over 50, with an annual turnover of 2.3 million. Last year it launched an American subsidiary based in Manhattan, and its clients now extend to Europe, Hong Kong and West Africa.

Metapraxis' Development Director, David Preedy, said "The use of APL has been fundamental to the design philosophy underlying RESOLVE. The original choice of APL as the development language reflected the personal expertise of the original team and the experience of previous developments in the related areas of Decision Support Systems and Graphics. Since then, however, that decision has been vindicated by the power it gives us to incorporate enhancements arising from our clients' experience.

"A new idea is initially provided experimentally, then incorporated as a customised feature for use by a small group of users. Depending on its acceptance in the business environment and how generally it will be useful, it may then be developed as a standard feature. APL has enabled us to undertake this evolutionary development without having a different version of the system for each different client."

British Design Awards are given annually by the Design Council and are recognised as the premier design accolade in Britain. This year's winning manufacturers and designers will be presented with their Awards by HRH The Duke of Edinburgh at a special ceremony in May. An exhibition of all the winning products is open to the public at the London Design Centre in the Haymarket, off Piccadilly Circus, until March 31st. Altogether 16 products have been chosen for the 1989 Awards, including three computer software products.