The Pursuit of S.E.M.

By Scott Hayes, President and Founder, DBI Software

As a senior leader in your company, what are the three things you should be demanding from your IT team? S.E.M.

I was having lunch recently with a senior executive of a top bank in Australia. The bank is known for the strength of its systems and its impeccable operations. So many of our clients are like this - leaders in their sectors whose drive for top results each and every time leads them to our company.

He said something that I think is so powerful and insightful that I wanted to share it with you. When it comes to his IT organization, he expects - and demands - three things. The same three things, by the way, you should be demanding from your IT team as a senior leader - S.E.M.

Stability - IT systems just need to work. First time. Every time. All the time. No matter what’s thrown at them. This makes perfect sense to me, because if your database is sick, your organization is unhealthy, your customers are unhappy, and your reputation suffers. Your database doesn’t exist in isolation - every part of your business is dependent on it.

Efficiency - IT systems need to work at peak performance. Speed is a business advantage - faster order processing, swifter customer service, quicker fulfillment, and more inventory turns. Efficiency is not only your friend, it’s your profit multiplier. And besides all of that, you paid a lot of money for the CPUs, memory, and licenses that comprise your IBM DB2 LUW installation. And you pay a lot in salaries for the DBAs who run them. And don’t forget the electric bill you pay each month to keep your IT systems going. You should  have a substantial return on investment, and you MUST avoid having urgent situations where the survival of your company depends on an unbudgeted purchase of non-returnable CPUs, memory, and licenses.

Marketing - IT leaders must be able to communicate to the executives the value and quality of the service they’re delivering to the organization. Executives shouldn’t have to intuit the state of their systems, or learn the lingo of tech to understand the health of their systems, and their ROI.

Now the reason these things impressed me was because they are the exact three things that our patented, award-winning software delivers for our clients:

1. Stability - DBI’s tools diagnose problems in about 15 seconds, and solve them in minutes - at a fraction of the cost of hiring consultants and purchasing non-returnable CPUs, memory, and licenses.  Plus, proactive automated monitoring can prevent problems before they cause stability issues.
2. Efficiency - DBI’s tools tune your database to ensure top performance at minimized operational cost.
3. Marketing - DBI’s pureFeat™ software reveals the real problems vexing your databases, and empowers your organization to validate appropriateness of changes before actually implementing them.  DBI pureFeat also generates the trend charts and comparison reports to help you communicate your successes throughout the organization.   It is your responsibility to share operational results – so, yes, we’ll help you brag a little!

As an executive, you rely on good information from your subordinates to make good decisions, and you have every right to insist on it.

What You Must Know
You can and should demand Stability, Efficiency, and Marketing from your IT team.

If your IBM DB2 LUW database isn’t keeping up with performance demands, or if you’ve just been handed an emergency purchase request for CPUs and memory - or you want to prevent this from happening in the first place - contact us. We’ll diagnose any database problems for free in about 15 seconds, solve a real root-cause problem in two hours or less, and save you hundreds of thousands of dollars in CPU’s, memory, licenses, consulting fees, and wasted time. Frankly, we’re not very popular with hardware and database license vendors, but your CFO, shareholders, and customers will love us.

What would your business be like if it ran 4x faster? We'll present a methodology and key metrics to help you achieve rapid, measurable, and significant performance gains in your DB2 LUW databases in minutes! Register Now for a Free Webinar.

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