As a software architect, I have successfully implemented numerous integration projects for large corporations. The focus was always on reading and transforming existing data and delivering it to the right place. In other projects in which new processes were actually digitized, I myself was dependent on third parties to provide the necessary data. Even when implementing an event-driven architecture, it was extremely difficult to convince the other parties involved to provide all the required data. Data owners are guarding their data and cannot scale provisioning fast enough to meet demand. Months can pass before an API is adapted to access the data needed. With the data-centric approach, we can all focus on value creation in IT and shift-left data integration during operational processing