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Traditionally developed business information systems developed through process-driven techniques cost much more than those created through data-driven techniques.
The fall-back strategy for enterprises is to "buy packages." That however just transforms the problem from determining a solution precisely fitted to the enterprise to one of buying somebody else's already determined solution.
Another alternative is to adopt the "Agile" approach to development. While the "Agile" approach has excellent characteristics regarding teamwork and rapid work product development, it focuses on the excellent development of "individual trees" without regard to the overall architecture of the "forest."
A study which compared the development approach to two relatively large scale business information systems in which the two different business information systems were developed through process driven techniques resulted in 4.6 times more work products to be developed into business information system components than were determined to exist under data-driven techniques.
In this study, the teams and projects were held constant. The only variable was the development approaches: process-driven and data-driven. Both approaches were main-stream and widely used. Both were explicitly defined to ensure faithful execution. At the end, the work products from these two different approaches for the two different projects were counted and their ratios computed. Data-centered won, hands down.
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