James Taylor's Decision Management

Ian, the other blogger over on www.edmblog.com, sent me this little snippet today:

68 percent - Proportion of the IT budget that average North American companies used to support existing software and hardware in 2006, according to Gartner. About 19 percent went to adding capabilities to keep up with company growth, and 13 percent was spent on technology to propel the company into new markets or sell products and services in new ways.
Source: Baseline

Wow. So if you actually need to deliver any innovation from your systems, you need to free up some of the money you are spending on application maintenance. Part of the problem here is poor maintenance processes. The use of business rules to modernize some of your legacy applications can be very effective. A great example of this was the California DMV who reduced the maintenance cost of a big legacy system by renovating just part of it using business rules.

Technorati Tags: application maintenance, business rules, innovation