John Wills

John Wills is the founder and principal of Prentice Gate Advisors and is focused on advisory consulting, writing, and speaking about data architecture, data culture, data governance, and cataloging. He is the former field CTO at Alation, where he focused on research and development, catalog solution design, and strategic customer adoption. He also started Alation’s Professional Services organization and is the author of Alation’s Book of Knowledge, implementation methodology, data catalog value index, bot pattern, and numerous implementation best practices. Prior to Alation, he was VP of customer success at Collibra, where he had responsibility for building and managing all post-sales business functions. In addition, he authored Collibra’s first implementation methodology. John has 30-plus years of experience in data management with a number of startups and service providers. He has expertise in data warehousing, BI, data integration, metadata, data governance, data quality, data modeling, application integration, data profiling, and master data management. He is a graduate of Kent State University and holds numerous architecture certifications, including ones from IBM, HP, and SAP.