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After decades of over engineering, abstraction, and distance from real decision making, I believe data is being reclaimed by the business. In Part 5 of The Death and Rebirth of Data series, I outline the principles defining the next era of data: outcome over infrastructure, business ownership over technical gatekeeping, radical simplification, data as an experience, and AI as a multiplier. This is not a new trend. It is a return to first principles, and to the purpose data was always meant to serve.
The Journey So Far
Over the past four parts of this series, we've taken a hard look at how an industry built on promise slowly lost its way.
1
The Day They Merged
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The Day They Merged
In Part 1: The Day They Merged (The Death and Rebirth of Data – Part 1), we traced the moment data stopped being a discipline of insight and became a subset of engineering, where success was measured in pipelines shipped rather than decisions improved.
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We Industrialised
In Part 2: We Industrialised (The Death and Rebirth of Data – Part 2), we saw how the industry industrialised the plumbing at scale, mistaking infrastructure progress for business value and confusing motion with impact, a pattern long observed in analytics research focused on platform led transformation (Davenport & Harris, Competing on Analytics).
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Drifting From Business
In Part 3 (The Death and Rebirth of Data – Part 3), we exposed how data drifted further from the business, becoming the domain of technologists while the people who needed it most were left waiting, translating, or disengaging, a recurring theme in Gartner and McKinsey research on analytics adoption failure.
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Data as an Experience
In Part 4: Data as an Experience (The Death and Rebirth of Data – Part 4), we acknowledged the final truth: even when data exists, even when it's technically accessible, the experience of using it is so fragmented and unintuitive that it might as well not exist at all, a reality echoed for decades in enterprise usability research (Nielsen Norman Group).
Now, in Part 5, we close the loop.
Because while the industry may have over engineered itself into paralysis, the story does not end in decline.
Data isn't dead. It's being reclaimed.
Not as a bigger platform. Not as a shinier dashboard. Not as another architectural pattern.
But as something closer to what it was always meant to be.
This is not a prediction. It is a statement.
The Rebirth Begins With a Simple Realisation
At its core, the rebirth of data begins with a truth the industry spent a decade avoiding:
Data was never meant to be an engineering problem. Data was always meant to be a business asset.
Somewhere along the way, we started asking the wrong questions.
We asked:
  • How do we scale the platform?
  • How do we modernize the stack?
  • How do we migrate to the cloud?
But we forgot to ask:
  • How do we help people make better decisions, today, not someday?
This gap between technical progress and decision value is one of the most cited reasons data and AI initiatives fail to deliver lasting impact (McKinsey Global Institute; Gartner Analytics Ascendancy Model).
The rebirth begins the moment an organization stops measuring success by the size of its data architecture and starts measuring it by the quality of its decisions.
It begins when data is no longer defined by:
  • pipelines
  • schemas
  • tools
  • vendors
and is instead defined by:
  • outcomes
  • understanding
  • confidence
  • action
It begins when a leader can ask a question in plain language and receive a trusted answer without knowing where the data lives, how it's joined, or who owns the pipeline, an ambition long discussed in decision centric analytics research (MIT Sloan Management Review).
It begins when data stops flowing through systems and starts flowing through conversations.
To frame this, I have detailed five principles.
PRINCIPLE 1
Outcome Over Infrastructure
Outcome Over Infrastructure
The first pillar of data's rebirth is a return to purpose.
For too long, data initiatives have begun with architecture diagrams and vendor shortlists. We treated infrastructure as the starting point and value as an eventual by product, a pattern well documented in enterprise analytics retrospectives (Davenport & Harris).
â–¡ The reborn approach inverts this entirely.
What happened to the business question, the bus matrix, and the use case?
Every data initiative must begin with a single, uncomfortable question:
"What outcome are we actually trying to change?"
Not:
  • What data do we have?
  • What tools should we buy?
  • What platform do other companies use?
But:
  • What decision is currently slow, unclear, or wrong?
  • Who is making that decision?
  • What insight would materially change their behavior?
From there, everything is designed backward.
This outcome first framing aligns closely with what leading research now defines as decision centric analytics and value led data strategy (McKinsey Global Institute; Gartner).
Instead of building a cathedral of technology and hoping value emerges one day, we start with value and build only what is required to deliver it, but do it fast.
Less speculation. Less waste. More intent.
PRINCIPLE 2
Business Ownership, Not Technical Gatekeeping
The second pillar of rebirth is returning data to its rightful owner: the business.
Not symbolically. Not in governance documents. Not in steering committees.
But operationally.
Sales
Sales owns sales truth.
Finance
Finance owns financial truth.
Marketing
Marketing owns customer definitions.
Operations
Operations owns operational reality.
Ownership does not mean building pipelines or managing infrastructure. It means owning meaning.
This distinction sits at the heart of the original Data Mesh philosophy, which framed decentralized ownership as accountability for semantics and outcomes, not technical execution (Zhamak Dehghani, Data Mesh: Delivering Data Driven Value at Scale).
The data team's role changes, profoundly.
They no longer act as translators or gatekeepers. They become platform builders, quality stewards, knowledge engineers, and enablers of autonomy.
When the business owns meaning, data finally moves at the speed of the organization, a pattern consistently observed in organizations successfully adopting decentralized data models (ThoughtWorks Technology Radar; BARC Research).
PRINCIPLE 3
Radical Simplification
If the previous decade was defined by accumulation, the next will be defined by subtraction.
The industry spent billions chasing complexity dressed up as sophistication, a risk Gartner has repeatedly warned undermines agility, trust, and return on investment.
The rebirth demands the opposite instinct.
The next generation of data leaders will win not by adding more layers, but by removing them.
They will replace brittle workflows with declarative logic, sprawling ETL jobs with expressive AI, and bespoke processes with shared patterns, trends already visible in modern platform research (Forrester Total Economic Impact studies).
The best data platforms of the next decade will not feel powerful because they are complex.
They will feel powerful because they are invisible.
PRINCIPLE 4
Data as an Experience, Not an Asset
In Part 4, we confronted an uncomfortable truth: access does not equal usability.
This distinction has been firmly established in user experience research for decades (Nielsen Norman Group).
â–¡ The rebirth reframes data not as something people extract, but something they experience.
Insights are no longer hunted. They are delivered.
This shift, from retrieval to experience, is increasingly recognized as the defining factor in analytics adoption and value realization (MIT Sloan Management Review).
PRINCIPLE 5
AI as a Multiplier, Not a Bandage
The final pillar of rebirth is AI, but not in the way the industry is currently applying it.
AI does not fix broken foundations.
It does not compensate for poor semantics.
It does not magically create trust.
Research consistently shows that AI initiatives fail when applied on top of fragmented data foundations (McKinsey; Gartner).
In the reborn model, AI is not a cosmetic layer.
It is a multiplier.
AI becomes the connective tissue between human intent, semantic meaning, data assets, and outcomes, a role increasingly described in enterprise foundation model research (Stanford Human Centered AI Institute).
What the Reborn Data Organization Looks Like
A reborn data organization is not bigger, it is sharper.
Lean
Aligned
Empowered
Conversational
Trustworthy
Adaptive
And above all, it is human.
The Rebirth Is Not a Trend, It's a Return
The rebirth of data is not about chasing the next architecture or vendor cycle.
It is a return to first principles.
📄 Data exists to help people understand:
  • what is happening
  • why it is happening
  • what to do next
We over engineered.
We over abstracted.
We confused complexity with progress.
Now, we simplify.
We humanize.
We reconnect to purpose.
Data is not reborn because of AI.
Data is reborn when it becomes
useful, usable, and used.
A Closing Statement
This is the statement for the next era of data:
01
Data exists for outcomes, not pipelines.
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Ownership belongs with the business.
03
Complexity is not sophistication.
04
Experience is the delivery mechanism for value.
05
AI is the enabler, not the answer.
06
Simplification is mastery.
If we can hold to these principles, data will not only be reborn, it will finally fulfill the promise it made decades ago.
Join a Data Conversation,
Cameron Price.
References:
  1. Davenport, T. H., & Harris, J. G. (2007). Competing on Analytics. Harvard Business School Press.
  1. McKinsey Global Institute. The Data Driven Enterprise of 2025.
  1. Gartner. Analytics Ascendancy Model and analytics adoption research.
  1. Dehghani, Z. (2022). Data Mesh: Delivering Data Driven Value at Scale. O'Reilly Media.
  1. ThoughtWorks. Technology Radar, Data Mesh and decentralized analytics entries.
  1. BARC Research. Business Driven Data Products and analytics strategy studies.
  1. Nielsen Norman Group. Enterprise UX and Usability Research.
  1. MIT Sloan Management Review. From Analytics to Insight to Action.
  1. Forrester Research. The Total Economic Impactâ„¢ of Modern Data Platforms.
  1. Stanford Human Centered AI Institute. Foundation Models in the Enterprise.