Principles

The Data-Centric revolution puts data at the center of the enterprise. Applications are optional visitors to the data.

Think about the various mobile phone apps that attach to your calendar. They don’t own your calendar but they know of it and can schedule events on it, set reminders, etc.

The data landscape of an enterprise is more complex than your calendar, but not impossibly so. Experience shows that it is possible to establish a shared model of the essential concepts that underpin all of the applications of a large firm.

The data landscape becomes an onion-like structure with raw or semi-processed data (think of a data lake or a triple store) and an ontology (think high-level data model) to interpret it and a guard (a layer that authorizes use and prevents bad things from happening to the data).

Once established, becomes the common denominator for the apps that perform the work of the firm.

The Data-Centric revolution will not be application-driven. There will be no killer app. That’s the point.

A more complete set of principles

1. Data is a key asset of any organization.
2. The current enterprise software paradigm is “Application-Centric.”
3. Hoarding data in proprietary and complex apps is a mistake.
4. Most of the excessive cost and complexity in Enterprise Apps stems from the relationship of the apps to the data.
5. We are committed to reversing this trend.
6. We understand that there is money to be made in the application-centric paradigm.
7. There is even more money to be saved in the data-centric paradigm.

How we feel about this:

• We believe that the current Enterprise Information System paradigm, centered on applications, with data as second class citizens, is at the heart of most of the problems with current Enterprise Systems.
• We further believe that the main barrier to changing this paradigm is not technical, but mental and inertial.
• We understand that there is a huge amount of money to be made in building, implementing and integrating applications in organizations, and that this is what keeps the application-centric paradigm alive.
• We also recognize that there is even more money to be saved in the enterprises that produce and consume information, by moving to a data-centric approach.
• It takes concerted effort to change entrenched habits, even when there are large financial incentives to do so. Therefore, we commit ourselves to begin the process that will lead to data-centric architecture in the firms we work with.

Other ways to think about the data centric revolution

NOW: Application-Centric	FUTURE: Data-Centric
Exorbitant, often prohibitive, cost of change.	Reasonable cost of change.
Data is tied up in applications because applications own data.	Data is an open resource that outlives any given application.
Every new project comes with a big data conversion project.	Every new project taps into existing data stores.
Data exists in wide variety of heterogeneous formats, structures, meaning, and terminology.	Data is globally integrated sharing a common meaning, being exported from a common source into any needed format.
Data integration consumes 35%-65% of IT budget.	Data integration will be nearly free.
Hard or impossible to integrate external data with internal data.	Internal and external data readily integrated.