ANALYTICOL — An analytical computing environment

This paper is an overview of this special issue of the AT&T Technical Journal on ANALYTICOL, an analytical computing environment developed by AT&T and based on the UNIX™ operating system. ANALYTICOL was developed to provide specific capabilities of value to business analysts. The environment has the potential to provide substantial productivity gains and quality improvements for analysts working on ad hoc studies, and analysts and programmers developing applications. The other papers in this issue describe some of the individual software tools that make up the ANALYTICOL environment. This paper describes a set of generic tasks that need to be performed in solving business analysis problems, and how these tools can work together to perform the tasks and build an application system. An example of a typical business problem in the telecommunications industry is provided to illustrate the use of the tools in a business environment.