Awards
Freedombase has been recognised in industry awards in 2001, 2002, and 2003.
The MIS Innovations Awards 2001
A copy of the relevant portions of the MIS Innovations Awards writeup follows, and is reproduced from Managing Information Strategies (MIS) Australia, Winter 2001, pages 22 and 47. Used with permission.
"This year marks the first MIS Innovations Awards. Our aim is to develop a publication to showcase the inspired use of technology that passes across the MIS Australia editorial desk every day. Ten technology categories were chosen after consultation with MIS Australia's sister division, Strategic Research. The response to the Awards has been astounding. More than 150 nominations were received from Australian companies for the 10 categories, with the standard of the entries being extremely high. Not surprisingly, the categories attracting a large number of entries included E-business, Knowledge Management/Business Intelligence and Customer Relationship Management. While there were plenty of extraordinary projects, clear winners emerged for all categories bar three. In Knowledge Management/Business Intelligence, E-business and Off the Wall, the competition was particularly fierce and in the end it was decided to award joint winners.
"An independent panel of experts judged each category. The judges, including leading IT professionals, consultants and analysts from across Australia, gave up their valuable time to assess nominations, for which MIS Australia thanks them. Criteria for assessing nominations included the project goals, the ensuing results, measures put in place for assessment of the project and, most importantly, whether technology had been used in a new and innovative way. Each category judge gave every nomination a score out of 10, and these were then totalled to determine the winners and placegetters. As this is the start of what will eventually be a new annual publication for MIS Australia, we are interested in receiving nominations from IT professionals throughout the year on projects falling into any of the below categories. Please e-mail emmag@fairfaxbm.com to request a nomination form for the MIS Innovations Awards and your innovation could be next year's winner.
"This is a very off-the-wall and innovative systems development tool." - Clive Bailey, Perpetual Trustees
"Freedombase is a response to a decade of impatience and frustration with computer systems that don't do the job properly. The designer, Glenn Groves, has a 10-year history as a technology professional and consultant in the IT industry and found during this period many companies didn't have adequate computer systems. He said they make do with barely passable systems because of the time and cost involved in customising and updating programs.
'There was an enormous gap between what was required and what was achievable, even in large organisations with dedicated teams of programmers constantly updating systems,' says Groves. He is also managing director of research and development at The Future is Freedom.
"In 1998, Groves accept the challenge and began work on the conceptual stage of a project aimed at radically simplifying the programming process by making the database that underlies all programmes intelligent.
'I tried to come up with a unique idea to get rid of a lot of necessary programming, by merging aspects of artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology with relational database design and management theory,' Groves says.
Reducing Development Time
"His goal was reduce the time spent on developing and maintaining custom designed information systems by 90 per cent. Groves has achieved his objective and has gone on to lodge a provisional patent with the Patent Office. Freedombase is a radical departure from relational databases, which comprise the foundation of most programs. Compared to databases that depend on extensive definitions of data types and relationships with other data, Freedombase builds potential data options into the program.
"For example, one short line of code in one location is enough to maintain a customer's balance in an open items accounts receivable system, when the system is created using Freedombase. No further imput from programmers is required.
"The software becomes an interpretative engine taking information defined in a simple spreadsheet and applying it to the database.
"Groves explains: 'What complicates computer programs is that you have to work out how data relates to everything else. I wanted to eliminate the need to redefine the programs when the business rules, or the rules related to the data, change.
'The core aspect of Freedomsoft is that it knows how everything is related to everything else, which helps to eliminate further programming,' he says.
Lateral Thinking
"Robin Shiffman, senior manager of Ernst & Young's eRisk Solutions, was one of the judges who voted for Freedomsoft for the Off the Wall category. He describes the technology as 'simple and elegant'.
'A fair amount of lateral thinking has gone into this project. The designer has taken a novel approach to the design of IT systems, drawing inspiration from seemingly irrelevant disciplines to create a new development structure,' he says.
'Anything that simplifies the development process as much as this has got to have real merit and potential.
'It is easy for non-technical people to miss the significance of what has been done here. But an organisation looking at the cost of developing IT and containing and reducing that outlay would truly appreciate the contribution this could make,' says Shiffman.
- Helene Zampetakis
The Consensus Software Awards 2003
A copy of the citation from the Consensus Software Awards follows, and is reproduced from the Consensus Web site. Used with permission.
"Freedombase is an exciting software development and maintenance tool.
"It is a patented combination of neural networking (artificial intelligence), combined with database and compiler design, to create an intelligent software tool that is both flexible and saves time for users, by avoiding the need for the creation of dedicated code.
"Freedombase is software of the future here today!