The Importance Of Data

It seems that a web application is entirely dependent upon and driven by data. For example, if you are building a product catalog you need to know many things about the products. The organization of the products will drive how users find them, the details users see for a product and the functionality built into the application to handle business rules/logic. It is very difficult to build an application when the data is not finalized and continues to change. Why does this happen? I think there are several reasons. First and most important. Non tech companies that are large multinational organizations are challenged when it comes to managing their data. The employees typically work in spreadsheets that get emails back and forth and around the organization. Large non-tech organizations are challenged by more than just their tech limitations. But their tech limitations occur because they are unwilling or unable to, internally, provide an api/restful or otherwise easy, programable access to the companies data. So employees resort to email and spreadsheets and manually assemble the information. It may have to do with internal politics or processes that quickly get outdated by advances in technology. The average corporate IT guy seems to double as a web expert inside the company. However, unless that internal web expert actually does their own web development outside, on their own time with technology of their choosing much of what they do is just purchasing “off the shelf” software and installing it for someone else to use. Inside, the internal IT gal / web expert does not have either the time nor the experience to worry about standards and advances in web technology. Why should they, the opinion higher up is that there are ‘off the shelf’ solutions out there waiting to be found, bought and installed but the internal web expert. What I believe is that there is no such thing as an off the shelf comprehensive solution. If you buy software to save money you will pay either in training/hiring someone with expertise for that particular solution or, you will pay by losing revenue because you believed the sales guy who said all you have to do is install it and let it solve all of the problems.