We’ve heard that companies must become data-driven. They must treat data as an asset, govern it, improve its quality, and make it easily available across the enterprise. Perhaps these pronouncements are becoming tiresome. But really they understate the change in how we regard data and compute and their relationship.
IT has always overseen both data and compute. We apply compute to data to derive business outcomes. Compute is a verb and data is a noun; compute is active and data is acted upon. At least until recently.
Compute has always been at the center of IT. We talk about applications and workloads. In cloud migrations we measure success by the number of workloads (compute) migrated. The main technologists of IT are software developers (compute) and operations folks (compute). Theoretical computer science talks about Turing machines (compute) and about programming languages. The history of computing is about the invention of increasingly sophisticated…
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/enterprise-strategy/true-data-centricity/