New systems introduced at Janus Worldwide

When IBM announced the release of the VisualAge environment back in 1993, it actually proclaimed a new era in programming. By the end of that era, programmers would no longer be regarded as weird people who think in cryptic categories and do unintelligible things. Like the guy in the picture.

More often than not, users found the UI software of the time quite difficult to understand and spent ages trying to remember how to work with such programs.

IBM’s announcement suggested that programmers and product managers would soon be sitting side by side drawing programs together on visual event trees. Yes: just draw, and VisualAge would do the rest. A veritable golden age!  But time passed, and this never became a reality.

I thought about this as R&D was tasked by the company’s management with choosing and implementing an HR process management system. In the course of the tender, R&D came across Monday, a rather interesting system, and while testing it, realized that the ideas of visual programming instead of traditional coding to set up a system are still alive. But first things first.

The system, or to be precise, the Monday.com platform, has gathered a fairly large group of “fans” around the world, including Coca-Cola and Lionsgate. Even during its first review, R&D noted the system’s friendly and up-to-date user interface. The HR staff also liked it.

Monday’s simple, convenient, and advanced interface makes working with the system an enjoyable and intuitive experience for users. With multiple standard widgets and features, some of which are already appropriately pre-configured for use, it is possible to analyze and work with several data slices.

• Element cards, for example for applicants, offer quick and easy access to CVs.
• Kanban boards enable visual oversight of work.
• Dashboards provide reporting information that empowers end-to-end process monitoring in real-time.

And the overriding value of the system is the aspect I mentioned at the beginning: condition- and event-based programming. The programming is in fact done on a visual event tree, which can be seen in the figure.