In the past, we have been told that the collected data is the most important asset for a company, or to put it in a more pronounced way: "the truth is in the database". Consequently, applications were built with this notion in mind. Business analysts and architects sat down, and first designed the data model. The questions they asked were: "What type of data do we have, and how are the various pieces of data related to each other?". The result of this effort was a so-called Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD).
What makes an entity, such as a Customer specific to a certain company and/or sector? It is not the fact that there is an entity Customer with various attributes, such as name and address, but the real distinction is in how this entity is used. An entity Customer has a totally different meaning in the context of a bank than it has in the context of a travel agency.
Data sitting in a data store is of no value as long as there are no processes defined about...