Does IT manage systems, or manage data?

The traditional view is that IT manages systems -- the data is the business’s concern. The only thing that IT people do with data is define the structure of data in databases, which means that the only work IT people do with data is to design the shape of the buckets that the businesspeople pour business data into. Smart enterprises are realizing that someone needs to manage the data within these systems: not merely the schema, but the data itself (the rows, not just the columns).