I have long felt and advocated that data resources must be the central focus of IS/IT and the development of information systems in organizations. Get the underlying data "right" and you have some chance of achieving integration (one view), interoperability, sharability, flexibility, evolvability to satisfy new and changing information system requirements.
.. Thirty years ago I wrote about the "Copernican Revolution" in data processing. [Gordon Everest, "Database Management: Objectives, System Functions, and Administration" McGraw-Hill, 1986, pages 4-7, & 29, and that was an outgrowth of my doctoral dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania "Managing Corporate Data Resources," 1974]. There I suggested that rather than view the world in terms of data being inputs and outputs of programs (application program centric), we must view the world with data at the center and programs revolving around the data drawing from and adding to the organizational information resources. As Dave McComb correctly observes, the battle of the journey continues.