6. Building Data-Centric Products

The purpose of this chapter is to provide guidance on how to operationalize a data-centric environment. This requires the decomposition of many legacy applications to what is known as a functional primitive program that provides reusable functionality. In other words, these functional primitive programs represent the “Lego” parts we discussed earlier. We also provide more detail on how to design digital twins which represent the logical replication of what individuals do physically. Our emphasis is that these reusable functional primitive Lego parts must be closely coupled with the data they need to accomplish their tasks, both input data and output results. We examine the digital business technology integration layer that depicts the components of data-centric products and how they interface with the data fabric infrastructure. The data fabric provides the necessary administrative functions to support for the products to complete their operations. The chapter also discusses the minimal viable product (MVP) which is a valuable way to test-launch and test new products and services.