After becoming the market leader in information technology engineering software, DDI was renamed KnowledgeWare and eventually purchased by Fran Tarkenton, who took it public.

[1] According to Computerworld's 25th anniversary issue, he was ranked fourth among the 25 individuals who have most influenced the world of computer science.

It is said to have originated in Australia between 1976 and 1980, and appears first in the literature in 1981 in the Savant Institute publication Information Engineering by James Martin and Clive Finkelstein.

The Martin thread in information technology engineering was strategy-driven from the outset and from 1983 was focused on the possibility of automating the development process through the provision of techniques for business description that could be used to populate a data dictionary or encyclopaedia that could in turn be used as source material for code generation.

The Martin methodology provided a foundation for the CASE (Computer-Aided Software Engineering) tool industry.

At the end of the 1980s and early 1990s the Martin thread incorporated rapid application development (RAD) and business process reengineering (BPR) and soon after also entered the object oriented field.

RAD approaches may entail compromises in functionality and performance in exchange for enabling faster development and facilitating application maintenance.