• quality and productivity of professional work are best assured by small to medium sized companies;
• collaboration between them benefits both themselves and their clients.

FLINT started as a commercial club, of some half a dozen members, in 1982. There followed several years of successful informal collaboration and steady growth, with FLINT attracting new members (including a number based outside the UK) whose careers had, in the main, outgrown the larger systems companies. In 1987 the FLINT Organization was incorporated as a company limited by guarantee, and at the same time a wholly owned trading subsidiary, FLINT Informatics Limited, was also formed.

FLINT Informatics was set up to provide a more formal framework for commercial co-operation, notably in relation to marketing and the performance of larger-scale projects and joint ventures. It is an effective commercial network of affiliated trading entities - small system companies, partnerships, sole traders - whose principals are members of FLINT. In general, for any particular co-operative project one of the Affiliate entities acts as the prime contractor and the other FLINT participants as subcontractors, although the option of FLINT Informatics Limited acting as prime contractor is not excluded.

the FLINT approach

The FLINT approach offers a level of service different from that offered by large system companies or contract agencies. The former can generally be relied upon to have good quality staff, especially at the more junior levels, but the best, most experienced, senior staff are frequently over-committed; moreover, often none of those who actually worked on the reference-projects quoted are available. The latter - the contract agencies - can perform a useful service in providing low cost manpower substitution on a convenient commercial basis, but without team construction, management and quality assurance.

FLINT, in contrast, assembles top class multi-disciplinary teams of motivated specialists whose expertise is rooted in their own personal working experience. FLINT provides back-up and can provide quality assurance by their peers. This enables the prime contractor to be more responsive to the client’s needs than larger, more conventionally organised competitors.