This blog will investigate putting data first rather than having business data be treated as exclusive to applications.  While functionality is important, software functionality is based on consistent operations on data or groups of data.  The application-centric view holds this consistency within the boundaries of one or more, but not all, applications.  The problems that arise from application-centric IT are well known: disparate data in data silos, making it difficult to share data across applications; inconsistent and redundant data; and the need to transform and integrate data for enterprise reporting and analytics.

A data-centric view maintains that any consistent operations on data or groups of data must hold for all applications, eliminating data transformations and making it easy to share data across applications.  Putting data first means we ensure the data is what we want it to be for the business and all its business uses before we build any functionality.  The consistent operations become data rules that are employed whenever an operation, such as data entry or reporting, occurs. Thus software functionality is no more that the execution of pre-defined data rules combined with usage rules for the user interface, such as for a web page, report, or query, a function is performing. 

The benefits of this are clear: data-centric data is standardized and correct across all applications and uses; there is easy sharing of data across applications; there is little, if any, need to transform or change data before it can be used with other data; data rules are known and applied consistently across all uses of data; all data is ready to be used for new reports, business uses, and software functionality; and, most importantly, new software functionality is purely incremental, comprised of new data, new data rules, and usage rules for new user interface components that build upon existing data, data rules, and usage rules without replicating, duplicating, or redoing any data or data rule. 

While becoming data-centric may sound like it is an ideal that is impossible to achieve, we are at a time when technology exists to make this possible. I will explore these in future articles and blog posts.  The challenge for IT is to move from its current application-centric environment where all old applications are legacy silos, and that any new application immediately becomes, to a data-centric environment where data, rules, and usage are unified, consistent, and always good-to-go. We know the problems of application-centric IT cannot be overcome easily--we live with them every day. It's time to make IT data-centric.