Background

ISA Informationssysteme GmbH was founded in 1987 as a spin-off of Fraun­ho­fer-Insti­tuts für Arbeits­wirt­schaft und Orga­ni­sa­tion (IAO) founded in Stuttgart by employees of the Human-Computer Interaction department.

At ISA Informationssysteme GmbH, together with other former Fraunhofer employees, they developed a tool that was ready for the market, with which the development of graphical user interfaces for computer applications could be extremely accelerated and a previously unknown level of development productivity achieved. The tool called “ISA Dialog Manager” – a so-called User Interface Management System (UIMS) – quickly established itself on the market and quickly found several thousand users at home and abroad. The ISA Dialog Manager business is still a mainstay of ISA Informationssysteme GmbH.

From the very beginning, the ISA Dialog Manager has been used in different industries and diverse areas of application. On its basis, dialogue systems were created for large individual developments as well as industry-specific products. For example, the ISA Dialog Manager formed the core of the “ODS Toolbox”, a tool with which airspace monitoring systems are implemented for many air traffic control systems worldwide. An independent company was founded in 1997 from the business area surrounding this product, which has since been absorbed into Barco Orthogon GmbH.

Our customers have often surprised us with what they have created based on the ISA Dialog Manager. At the same time, they gave us important impetus for the further development of the product. The range of applications ranges from control software for machine tools and production systems, to business applications in banks and insurance companies, to the workplace applications of clerks in tax offices and at the German Pension Insurance (former LVA and BfA).

We are also impressed by the size of some of the systems developed with the ISA Dialog Manager. Although we could actually have guessed it. Because with the architecture of the ISA Dialog Manager, we are one of the pioneers of modern, multi-layered client/server and multi-tier applications. The Model-View-Controller principle (a further development of the Seeheim model) with its separation of the display, application and data storage layers was one of our guidelines for product development from the beginning and remains so to this day.

The ISA Dialog Manager makes the development of graphical user interfaces easy, thereby opening up many possibilities for its users. In order to fully exploit this potential, our customers soon also needed our know-how in the development of dialogue systems and tools for software development. Initially, the product offering was supplemented with support and a training program. And our employees are increasingly involved in our customers' development projects as consultants, architects and programmers. These services gave rise to a second pillar of ISA Informationssysteme GmbH, which is now just as important to our company as the software license business.

Some applications that our customers have developed with the ISA Dialog Manager have been working reliably for years. We have been supporting these customers for just as long with the further development of applications, some of which have already been migrated to new platforms several times. These applications and this collaboration with our customers make us a little proud. That our products prove themselves in daily use and that customers place their trust in our products, our employees and our knowledge over such a long period of time.

With the ISA Dialog Manager we have grown and, in a certain sense, grown up. A lot has changed in the course of this development. Applications became components of application landscapes and their integration became more important. The ISA Dialog Manager received additional interfaces and thus became more open. Increasingly complex applications can only be created and maintained with powerful development environments. For many tasks, software developers today have several professional development tools to choose from, including some that are free to use as open source software and can be adapted to their own requirements. We take this situation into account with the IDM Eclipse plugin, which extends the scope of the development platform Eclipse for the development of graphical user interfaces with the ISA Dialog Manager.

We have also remained true to our scientific roots and are regularly involved in joint development projects with universities, research institutions and companies. No matter where our employees come from, there is at least a little bit of the Swabian inventor in everyone, as people from our region are often characterized. We are still curious about thinking outside the box as well as about the exciting developments in the area of human-technology interaction.