When to Use kinodb > Typical Uses of kinodb

Typical Uses of kinodb

Situation

Solution

Rapid development of bespoke applications

kinodb is ideally suited to the development of complex data-centric applications. It enables the swift development of complex applications for deployment to any numbers of users. A considerable proportion of the time spent in developing any application is spent in building forms and data maintenance screens and then in the testing phase. With a kinodb application, all necessary forms are dynamically built based on the metadata, saving considerable amounts of time in the coding phase. The testing phase, then need only focus on testing the design meets the user requirements, not on testing the applications code and integration. Examples of kinodb applications include:

Example	Description
Contact logging	Tracking the contacts made to customers and suppliers, whether by phone, fax, email or post. Logging the outcome of the activity and whether future contacts are required. A specific example of this might be a help desk application or a tool to support the inbound / outbound activities of a contact centre.
Invoice Tracking	Tracking the status of invoices, generating new invoices, logging payments, etc.
Asset Tracking	A major problem faced by many large organisations is tracking and recording their assets, for example computers equipment such as desktops, laptops, printers, etc. This problem is further compounded because these assets are made up of a number of components. For example, when an employee leaves the company and returns their laptop, are they returning all the components supplied by the company - mouse, power supply, spare battery, etc.
Software Licensing	Another major problem faced by IT departments is keeping track of software licenses, how many are owned, how many are used (and by whom) and what software is being used for which there are no licenses.
Generic Data Application	Appropriate for any large or small data-centric database application.

Prototyping

kinodb is an excellent prototyping tool, allowing prototypes to be built in hours rather than days or weeks. Plus with kinodb, effort expended on a proof of concept need not be thrown away, it can instead be used as the basis for further development.

System definition

Requirements definition is key to successful development, yet conventional development tools and methodologies often fail to bridge the gap between users and developers. Misunderstandings at the early stages of a development cost dearly in terms of wasted time and development effort. Using kinodb, the cycle time from the statement of a requirement to visibility of implemented functionality is reduced to the point where users and developers can work as a collaborative team.

Systems integration

Most organisations have accumulated a multitude of different systems used across the business performing overlapping tasks. Each has a different definition of business data, uses its own reference numbers, etc. For example, data about customers, assets and people can often end up spread across numerous systems. kinodb can be deployed as a middleware product, acting as a central data dictionary for all applications and providing the translation between the various systems and their respective data definitions. Once determined, these data definitions can be used as the basis for the implementation of new systems, as well as to aid exchange of data between existing systems, data cleansing operations, or to help report company-wide information.

Post merger integration

kinodb's metadata modelling capabilities can be used to support the post merger intergration process. kinodb can be used to hold a catalogue of all systems, the entities and processes supported by each, and their interrelationships. This model can then be used as the basis for the rationalisation and integration of the suite of applications.

Typical Uses of kinodb

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