The End of the Centralized Data Team
- Dave Findlay
- Aug 21
- 3 min read
The data team of 2030 won’t be a team at all.
It will be a network. Distributed. Embedded. Everywhere... and nowhere.
For years, companies have treated data like a function to be scaled:
Build a centralized team.
Hire engineers.
Add analysts.
Create a center of excellence.
But the more they scale, the more things slow down.
The more people they hire, the more tickets, projects and roadmaps pile up.
And the more advanced the tooling gets, the harder it becomes to answer a simple question.
Why? Because the structure is broken.
When you centralize data, you separate it from the context it needs to be useful.
You end up with:
• A data team solving problems it doesn’t fully understand.
• Business users submitting tickets for insights they needed yesterday.
• Decisions delayed because the system was designed around service, not speed.
It’s not a resourcing problem.
It’s an operating model problem.
The problem.
Most business functions have central teams, like finance, HR, legal, and IT.
But in well-run organizations, they don’t operate as distant silos. They function through embedded partnerships.
Take finance.
Yes, there’s a central finance org. But large business units have embedded finance partners s who understand the goals, pressures, and trade-offs within a specific team. They don’t just process budgets. They help shape them.
HR works the same way.
You don’t ask a centralized HR team to solve every people issue. You embed HR business partners into teams to handle hiring, performance, and team dynamics, in context.
Even legal — one of the most centralized functions — embeds specialists for commercial, product, or privacy work when it matters most.
And of course, product and engineering teams left centralization behind years ago.
They embed product managers, designers, and engineers into cross-functional squads aligned to domains and customer outcomes (onboarding, growth, retention, etc.)
So why is data still so centralized and so far from the decisions it’s meant to inform?
The future is embedded, not centralized.
The best data-driven organizations are moving in a new direction.
They’re shifting from a centralized service model to a distributed capability model.
Instead of one big data team serving the company, they embed:
• Analysts in marketing, sales, and operations.
• Data engineers aligned to product teams and domains.
• Governance stewards inside the business, not hovering above it.
The central team of the passed becomes repurposed to:
• Build and maintain shared infrastructure.
• Define lightweight standards and best practices.
• Create tooling, templates, and training.
• Build trust, not bottlenecks.
Think of it like an operating system.
Not doing the work itself, but enabling others to do it faster, better, and in context.
The impact of getting this right.
The result?
• Faster, more relevant decisions made closer to the front lines.
• Stronger ownership of data quality and outcomes.
• Higher leverage from central teams, who become enablers — not gatekeepers.
The centralized data team isn’t evolving.
It’s dissolving into something better.
Not a team.
A capability.
Woven into the fabric of the business.
This isn’t the end of data.
It’s the beginning of doing it right.
At Fuse, we believe a great data strategy only matters if it leads to action.
If you’re ready to move from planning to execution — and build solutions your team will actually use — let’s talk.
