I have seen the basic tenets and trends towards the needs and benefits for a data centric architecture repeated over and over again in my work with CRM, customer analytics, loyalty, digital marketing, e-commerce and related solutions. Adopting a data centric architecture and making data a first class, primary organizing principle for solution architecture needs to be a vital imperative for all organizations, not just IT. Big data was an attempt to address this need but it only partially accomplished a true data centric architecture. I believe The shift to a data centric approach will be a major generational change in solution architectures and truly transformative, similar to the major impact and rethinking of approaches to IT infrastructure, platforms, and service architectures that the shift to Cloud/SaaS/Paas/DevOps rendered. It should be very interesting to see how this all plays out.