Yes, be data centric. It’s the opposite of being application centric.
For the most part, for the past 50 years we have all lived in an application-centric world where a host of applications (sometimes thousands of applications) often with their own data schema, run the organization.
The concept of an API (Application Programming Interface) was a great idea that became especially popular around the year 2000 to solve a short-term problem (Y2K) only to make matters increasingly worse year after year as companies solve their immediate issue with one more API after one more API, without thinking through a better approach.
Applications today are so intertwined; it should be called a man-made disaster given the number of humans dedicating their lives to deciphering and untangling the mess. It’s time to change the rules of the game.
The new rules of the game are to be data centric. This message is as much for the C-Suite as it is for the IT professional. The reason the C-Suite should care about data centricity and knowledge graphs is that data is at the heart of strategic decision making. (And this is not to minimize a long list of many other benefits of data centricity.)
Corporate strategy requires a holistic view of the enterprise, including the ability to view data by LOB (aka: data alignment) as well as across LOBs.
In the new data-centric approach, you define things once, and when you define a “thing” you define it well. A business exec well understands the concept of a shared enterprise glossary – and the IT professional understands the value of triples, including triples accessed as Linked Data (such as accessing industry data based on Porter’s five-forces model at https://IndustryKG.com).