For years, companies have spent heavily on software systems and automating tasks. These endeavors brought efficiency but also created an obsessive focus on monolithic business applications. In today’s fast-moving, data-focused world, this approach is becoming a liability. Indeed, this fixation on inflexible software applications and rigid automation workflows is hobbling business agility and innovation. Without a doubt, a seismic shift is needed where businesses start adopting data-centric strategies instead of maintaining an application-centric mindset. By treating data as a permanent asset and focusing on its targeted collection, analysis, and utilization, businesses can unlock new insights and access emerging technological capabilities that were once beyond their reach.

This shift to a data-centric way of thinking will differentiate those businesses that will thrive and those that will be left behind. In this article, I’ll look at six advantages of businesses adopting a data-centric mindset to maximize data insights and enable rapid tech adoption for a competitive advantage.

Data-Centricity: A New Business Mindset To Overcome Our Limiting Application-Centric Practices.

Software has transformed the way businesses operate. However, in today’s world of “Big Data” and Artificial Intelligence (AI), aging enterprise software has started to hobble business innovation. Further, most business software is characterized as needing constant updates, breaking often, and costly to replace. Moreover, software by its nature processes data either as an input or output, with data itself being a secondary concern. Indeed, Today, this trend persists with enterprise software and Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms, where data is essentially a byproduct of their processes.

Over time the volume of data and automation has increased. As a result, businesses have connected these systems to others, yet they still treat data as a byproduct, leading to outdated, disjointed data silos. To tackle this issue, businesses have started using data integration and Business Intelligence (BI) tools to bring together scattered data sources. However, this often feels more like a temporary fix than a well-thought-out strategy.

On the other hand, there is a new data-centric approach that can overcome these limiting application-centric practices. Indeed, by business leaders adopting this data-centric mindset, their organization can regain agility, establish a Single Source of Truth (SSOT), streamline automation processes, and reignite innovation. This idea of a data-centric mindset is embodied in the Data-Centric Manifesto that is endorsed by numerous tech experts and thought leaders. See below for some of its key principles 

Key Principles of the Data-Centric Manifesto

• Data is a key asset of any organization.
• The current enterprise software paradigm is “Application-Centric.”
• Hoarding data in proprietary and complex apps is a mistake.
• Most of the excessive cost and complexity in Enterprise Apps stems from the relationship of the apps to the data.

Indeed, adopting a data-centric mindset allows organizations to recognize data as a strategic asset and focus on maximizing its value. Moreover, this approach provides the flexibility to adapt to changing conditions and capitalize on new opportunities. Further, this data-centric mindset becomes the difference between merely automating existing processes versus gaining the data insights to transform the business. For a detailed explanation of what a data-centric business is, see my article, A Data Centric Business: The Best Way To Agility, One Truth, Simplicity, Technology Innovation.

The Benefits of Being Data-Centric with Examples.

Now, it is hard to change to a data-centric mindset overnight, especially a whole organization that previously had an application-centric approach to leveraging information technology. At the same time, if an organization does transition to a data-centric approach for doing business, they can immediately start to reap the benefits. These data-centric benefits include:

For a detailed discussion of these data-centric benefits with examples, see below.

1. Superior Business Agility: Not Chained To Data Silos Or Legacy Applications.

Business Agility: The Best Way For Leveraging Digital Tech To Disrupt Competitors, Seize Opportunities, And Overcome Obstacles

First for any business, being agile is crucial for staying competitive in a rapidly changing market. By being data-centric, businesses can quickly adapt to changes in customer behavior, market trends, and emerging technologies. Especially for enterprise-size businesses, they can more easily take advantage of new opportunities. Indeed, no longer will legacy systems constrain a business’ data. Further, data silos will not need to exist that businesses can only partially access. For more on business agility, see my article, Business Agility: The Best Way For Leveraging Digital Tech To Disrupt Competitors, Seize Opportunities, And Overcome Obstacles.

For an example of business agility take a large “data-centric” retailer. In this case, the organization can easily analyze sales data generated by multiple systems and across multiple channels. This results in business leaders making informed decisions about inventory management and marketing strategies.

“Data really powers everything that we do.”

Jeff Weiner

2. High Confidence In Data: There Is A Single Source Of Truth (SSOT) Vs Multiple Versions Or Copies.

Being A Data Centric Business: It’s Going Beyond The Frenzy Of More Big Apps And High Tech

Large businesses often have multiple departments or teams working with different sets of data. Having one single source of truth (SSOT) ensures that everyone is working with the same accurate information. For example, a large financial institution that is data-centric can ensure that all its employees are working with the same customer data, reducing the risk of errors and improving customer service.

Today, many businesses and their employees lack confidence in the data that resides in their particular system. Thus, many times the data is either copied or entered over and over again in different systems. Personally as a customer myself, I cannot tell you how many times I have had to re-enter or tell a business’ employee to re-enter my customer information into their business systems multiple times.

“Data that is loved tends to survive.”

Kurt Bollacker

3. Improved Decision-Making: Having High-Quality Data that is Complete, Accurate, Timely.

AI Impact On Business Decisions – Know How To Best Apply To Get The Most Benefits

Large businesses make decisions based on complex data sets that require careful analysis. If a business is data centric, business leaders will make better decisions. This is because their data is complete, accurate, and timely. Moreover, both advances in AI and data analytics are enabling businesses to improve their decision-making capabilities. However to maximize these data-centric technologies, they need high quality data. For more information, see my article, AI Impact On Business Decisions – Know How To Best Apply To Get The Most Benefits.

To illustrate the value of a data-centric approach for corporate decision-making, take a large healthcare provider. A data-centric organization can use patient data to identify patterns and trends in health outcomes and make informed decisions about treatment options. No more do employees have to work with partial data sets or out-of-date information. Moreover, decision-making is not just improved, but streamline. No longer do employees waste time coordinating with other departments to gather and compare data from different systems.

“There are lies, damned lies and statistics.”

Mark Twain

4. Simplified Software: Lower Costs, Increase Reuse Of Code.

Large businesses often have complex IT systems that require constant maintenance, updates, and worse, large software subscription fees. Many times these software updates are because the business has to make use of new types of data. Thus, they, or their software vendor, must make programming changes in the software code. 

With a data centric approach to software, a lot of “bloated” code can be done away with. This is because a “data centric” business software application can just focus on the software functions. For example, the software does not need a lot of “if” statements to deal with data content as that can be handled in the data structure itself. As a result, this reduces development time and costs while improving the quality of software products. Also, there are more opportunities for code reuse as software functions need less customization for different types of data content. By leveraging existing code, businesses can focus on innovation rather than reinventing the wheel.

See Yehonathan Sharvit’s blog posting, Principles of Data-Oriented Programming for more on how “data centric” software simplifies coding.  

5. Faster Adoption of Needed Technologies: Including AI, IoT, and Other Data-Centric Information Technologies.

Data-centric businesses are better equipped to leverage new and needed technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT). These technologies rely heavily on data, making them a natural fit for data-centric businesses. By adopting emerging technologies early on, businesses can gain a competitive advantage and stay ahead of the curve. To detail, see below.

a. Artificial Intelligence: The Need for Quality Data Sets. 

AI is best leveraged if it has access to large, quality data sets. The more a business and its automation is data centric, the better it can quickly leverage the latest AI technologies. See Neptune.AI’s Data-Centric Approach vs Model-Centric Approach in Machine Learning for a detailed explanation of the importance of taking a data centric approach with AI and machine learning (ML).

b. IoT Devices And Systems: The Need to Fully Leverage Data Across the Enterprise. 

Many times IoT systems are implemented for one purpose and then the data gets locked into one system. With a data centric approach, business users across the entire organization can access data for a wide variety of other purposes, now and in the future. For example, a large logistics company that is data-centric can use IoT sensors to track shipments. However, later they can use that same data for optimizing delivery routes, vehicle procurement planning, and so on. For more information on IoT, see my article  Internet Of Things Examples – Hidden Technology Automating Logistics.

Internet Of Things Examples – Hidden Technology Automating Logistics

6. Streamlined Data Security, Integration, And Analytics.

Being data-centric simplifies data security, integration, portability, and analysis by providing a centralized approach for managing data. This data centric approach allows businesses to implement standardized security measures to protect their data from unauthorized access or breaches. It also makes it easier for software applications to access different data sources.

For example, a large ecommerce company that is data-centric can use a centralized approach to store customer information securely and analyze it to improve marketing campaigns. A centralized approach makes it easier to share customer data with other systems such as inventory management or shipping systems. Overall, businesses that are data-centric simplify the management of their data and make better use of their information assets.

“We are surrounded by data, but starved for insights.”

Jay Baer

More Data-Centric References.

For more on the technical aspects of a data centric approach, see Dan DeMers’ post The Shift from an App-Centric to Data-Centric Architecture and Tam Tran-The’s Data Oriented Programming With Python.

Also, for more data-centric references, see my article, A Data Centric Business: The Best Way To Agility, One Truth, Simplicity, Technology Innovation. This article looks at the key attributes of a Data-Centric business. Also, for details on the differences between data-centric, data-driven, and application-centric, see my article, You Need To Think Data Centric To Be A Successful Business: Stop Being Data Driven, Application Centric.

A Data Centric Business: The Best Way To Agility, One Truth, Simplicity, Technology Innovation

For more from SC Tech Insights, see the latest articles on Data and Information Technology.