Beginning Oracle® Application Express

1.2. Why Don't You Have It?

But these table stakes are not, by themselves, enough. These requirements have led, over the years, to an approach that frequently used tools and platforms that were designed for personal use, such as Microsoft Access or spreadsheets. Initially, these user- and developer-friendly tools seemed like a great idea — a good developer could create applications very rapidly.

The problems arose after that initial deployment. Because of inherent limitations with the scalability and functionality of these tools, organizations ended up with a mess — hundreds of different applications, and dozens of sources of data and versions of the truth. This jumble of systems led to enormous maintenance requirements, which created a lot of extra overhead. Sometimes these overhead requirements were so high that standard practices were just abandoned, leaving critical data unprotected and insecure — or led to the development of even more systems, compounding the problem even more. Couple this with increasing regulatory demands, and you have a recipe for an unmanageable mess that could potentially put mission-critical data at risk.

This brief description only summarizes the acute pain that you and your client base feel. What this list of problems doesn't cover is the lost opportunity that comes from such a fragmented set of systems. The value of data grows as that data grows, through continued use and, more significantly, through integration with additional data to create a broader ...