Buy vs. Build Revisited: The Rise of Affordable Custom Solutions

by James Wood | Jun 19, 2026| IT Strategy, AI, Cloud

For decades, the conventional wisdom around enterprise software has been pretty straightforward: buy whenever possible, and build only when absolut...

Why Your AI Doesn't Understand Your Business

by James Wood | Jun 03, 2026| AI, Agentic AI, Microsoft Foundry

For the past few years, the AI conversation has been dominated by increasingly powerful large language models (LLMs). Every new model release seems...

The Flywheel Effect: How the Right Support Turns Technology into a Compounding Asset

by James Wood | May 28, 2026| Business Transformation, IT Strategy, Bowdark Lighthouse

If you're like most organizations, you've probably made some serious investments in your software landscape over the years. Chances are you have an...

SAP Sapphire 2026: Knee-Jerk Reactions

by James Wood | May 21, 2026| SAP, SAP BTP, SAP S/4 HANA

A couple of weeks ago, SAP held its Sapphire 2026 conference in Orlando, Florida. As SAP’s premier annual event, it once again delivered a mix of b...

Upgrade Your ERP One Module at a Time: The Composable ERP Playbook

by James Wood | May 08, 2026| ERP, Composable ERP, Data Fabric

For decades, ERP modernization has been thought of as an all-or-nothing proposition. The monolithic nature of traditional ERP systems has forced or...

The Legacy Tool Trap: When Your Middleware Becomes an Expensive Habit

by James Wood | Apr 24, 2026| Enterprise Integration, Cloud, Low-Code / No-Code

Walk into almost any established organization today and you'll probably encounter middleware or integration infrastructure that's been running far ...

Is Microsoft Fabric Right for You? A Practical Guide for Power BI Customers

by James Wood | Apr 20, 2026| Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, Data & Analytics

If you're like most organizations, you probably didn't start using Power BI with any grand ambitions. People across the business just needed better...

From Reactive to Proactive: Making Your ERP Bring the Work to You

by James Wood | Apr 08, 2026| ERP, Modern Work, Process Optimization

Most ERP systems do exactly what they were designed to do. They capture transactions, enforce structure, and serve as a reliable system of record.U...

Fabric Forward: What We Learned at FabCon 2026

by James Wood | Mar 21, 2026| Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, AI

This week, the Bowdark team headed down to Atlanta to attend the third annual Microsoft Fabric Community Conference. As is often the case with thes...

Pointing AI at Your Competitive Edge

by James Wood | Mar 07, 2026| AI, IT Strategy, Business Transformation

For a while now, much of the conversation around AI has been focused on efficiency and cost reduction. This is largely because businesses are looki...

Before You Buy Another AI Tool, Download Your Team's Tribal Knowledge

by James Wood | Feb 28, 2026| AI, Process Optimization, Process Mining

Organizations everywhere are in the midst of an AI spending spree. Copilots are being deployed, agents are being piloted, and automation platforms ...

Unused Data Is Killing Your Business Performance

by James Wood | Feb 16, 2026| Data Strategy, Data Integration, Data & Analytics

If you're like most organizations, you're not short on data. If anything, you probably have more of it than you know what to do with. Reports, form...