Remember dinosaurs when you were a kid? You were so fascinated by them that you memorized the names of the meanest and ugliest lizards to ever roam the planet. Impressing your parents with your enormous knowledge of extinct reptiles as they ponder the fine line between childhood pastime and signs of a future serial killer… Survival of the fittest, in the era of the enterprise, uncovers a new definition of what is ‘fit.’

Agility = Survival

It’s funny that the small, agile creatures of the Jurassic period are the survivors with relatives still gracing our ecosystem hundreds of millions of years later. The small and medium businesses of today have a much easier time adopting agile practices as well. In fact, if it wasn’t for this crazy idea of “too big to fail” – we may have witnessed yet another mass extinction of corporate proportion in 2009.

Large corporations face large obstacles as they transform their legacy IT systems into future proof, integrated solutions. Even so, business agility is scalable. Agile applications provide an unparalleled return on investment because they can be implemented and modified extremely quickly. And most importantly, they are made to stand the test of time.

I suppose the moral of this story is that business agility can be considered a corporate value that needs to be implemented when a business is small. The reason giant companies are having a difficult time staying agile is because their environment, like the dinosaurs, just got a whole lot different. We’re in a technological age of fiber optics and cloud computing – forces that can shadow the cold blooded creatures of our own time if they don’t sharpen up.

Sure, the media loves to talk about the big guys and their billion dollar assets, sharp teeth and heightened sense of well, bureaucracy– but by now you should realize that technology is giving companies the upper hand in making decisions faster, implementing strategy more efficiently, and surviving meteorological catastrophe (so to speak).

The MBA cohort from Curry College (Milton, MA) was introduced to Mendix during our Management of Information and Technology course. During this class our cohort had been broken up into teams combining 4-5 varying backgrounds. After a brief introduction to the Mendix model driven application Professor Akram Ahmed challenged our groups to develop a business model and create a Mendix solution to support it.

from L to R: Han Pieter Duyverman (Mendix), Professor Ahmed Akram, Joe Mearn, Marc Lehane, Pat Casey, Jon Bulman, Vincent de la Mar (Mendix)

Our group, the Step Dads consisted of Marc Lehane (Curry College- Business Management), Joseph Mearn (Hamilton College -Economics), Jon Bulman (Westfield State College -Business Management), and Patrick Casey (Colby-Sawyer College-Business Administration). Most of this team had very little experience in database creation or any sort of IT implementation. Through the basic logic we learned during our program and software operational overview we had one day in class, we were able to design and implement a basic operational customer management system.

Together we proposed and offshore gaming facility who hosted our customers pro football betting action. In this imaginary business we would ask that our customer supplied up front a payment of $5000.00 to create an account. Through the use of the “Micro flow” feature we were able to create logic that most companies would need an experience programmer to create. Based the weekly game results, the Mendix program would determine the winner of every betting option. From there the customer’s betting table would update and determine the transfer value for the customer’s account. At the customer screen, the built in microflow would look to the betting table and summarize the individual’s activity (total transfer amount) and reflect it on the customer.

Though this is a basic business model, we were able to develop it in under two weeks and under 16 working hours without any formal training. The Mendix website helped us teach ourselves through use of their forum and tutorials. We feel as if we were given more time we would have been able to develop a program at par with one that companies would have to invest large amount of money into and spend months and months to implement.

And the winning team is:

… Dennis Pallet and Allard Brand with their Mendix implementation of the “University Enrollment Case”.

Congratulations guys!! Well done! Below is an summary of the jury report:

The University enrollment case is the most complete project for several reasons. First of all, the project was correctly modeled; the project contains several validations, delete behaviour was set and they clearly used the Mendix Modeling conventions. The group was able to make use of webservices to streamline the enrollment process. Further, by calling a Java action, they made it possible to generate passwords given that it requires anonymous access. This realistic approach is supported by both admin interfaces and student interfaces. The group also worked out the idea of sending a welcome email to University’s new applicants. Most important, this University enrollment case reduces lots of manual work, processes are more efficient and the simple sign-up process is user friendly.

Proud-looking Dennis Pallet and Allard Brand