Adam Wilson

Application owners / senior-level IT allocate a certain percentage of their budget to sustaining, enhancing, and transforming their applications. In most organizations, the largest percentage of the IT spend is on sustaining the applications or basically "keep the lights on" type of activities, which leaves little money to enhance them to support business agility and new business requirements, or transform them to leap frog over the competition. Organizations that implement a solid data management strategy in support of their applications can maximize the return from their application investments. They can lower the cost of sustaining their applications, thus releasing budget to do what they should be doing, which is supporting the needs of the business. Innovative CIOs are actually rethinking their application environments, from just focusing on the application - t... (more)

Stop Buying Database Licenses: You Have All the Capacity You Need

Any organization that has deployed a business application has experienced the joy of procuring database licenses. Most database software licensing models are based on the quantity and type of compute processing cores in the underlying database server - the more cores in the processor and the more processors in the server box, the higher the cost of the database software license. Depending on the application and the business's expectations, the tolerance threshold for performance can vary. This is typically considered during the design and testing phases of an application deployme... (more)

How to Enhance Applications to Support Business Agility (Part 2)

Sustaining applications in the most cost-effective and efficient fashion is the foundation to maximizing a return on data. But it is only the foundation. Organizations have to move beyond sustaining applications to driving innovation, and the first step in that progression is learning the best ways to enhance existing applications and implement new applications that will help modernize business processes and support business agility. The challenges around enhancing applications are well agreed upon. The top challenges include: Insufficient Data Quality - Data quality issues of on... (more)

Transform Your Applications to Drive Business Innovation & Growth (Part 3)

Businesses can be transformed, sometimes through new leadership, sometimes through new market realities or business relationships. But perhaps the easiest way, for IT at least, to transform the business is by enabling the business to evolve from a data silo'd organization to a data-centric enterprise and by unleashing the power of data in new ways. Of course, easy is a relative term, and there are substantial challenges to truly transforming a business environment and proactively supporting business needs through the use of data. These include: Achieving a Single Source of Truth ... (more)