I am signing the manifesto because I have seen the dramatic inefficiencies and costs of the current approach.
I worked in an enterprise that had entangled itself into high complexity using the tactical, application-centric, or more accurately, a myopic, project-driven and application-centric approach and lost its ability to adjust to market and regulatory changes. This put the enterprise at high risk and, even if survivable, required a very costly and radical set of changes to become nimble again and stay competitive. I believe they succeeded but it was very costly across many dimensions.
The data-centric approach is one of the best ways to maintain business agility. I think the problem is one of education of enterprise leadership to understand that data/information/knowledge assets are a necessary (as in fundamental and required) and a strategic part of being a modern, competitive business.
The manifesto embodied many of the ideas my colleagues and I had recognized as we evaluated issues, problems, and lessons learned about failures and inefficiencies. The principles and other guidance is very similar to what we came up with and have seen in other thoughtful commentary in the industry. But I simply agree with it at an intuitive level based on my experience and observation over 30 years in enterprises. The waste and inefficiency of the current approach is enormous and I'd like to do my small part to make this better. Also, there are few people capable of understanding the full enterprise context. Dave McComb is one of those and has the stature, contacts, and authoritative presence to make it happen.
This seems a mundane item to most leaders, but if they knew its significance, they would ask why we are already not using a data-centric approach. I would perhaps even broaden the name to a knowledge-centric approach and leverage the modern knowledge management and representation technologies that have and are currently emerging. But the principles stand either way.