Is there a word for this

I have posted this on news.securecomp.org also, but am interested in people
here's opinions.

Just say a company needs to write a program to keep track of calls to
customers. They get someone to write them an app and call it "Call Log App".
Then someone wants to keep track of staff holidays so someone writes them a
different app called "Staff Holiday App". Then someone wants to keep track
of which staff made the calls to the customer so they do some hack to either
duplicate staff in both apps or link them up. Then someone wants to
automatically send email to the staff/customers but they don't store emails
against the name. Because they want to do this in both apps they duplicate
all the work but make it a little different in each. Over the years this
continues to build into more and more of a mess.

The alternative would be to say right at the start that we need a company
wide application to do stuff. This application will be called "Company X
App". It will store all the basic data that relates to the company, eg
staff, customers, products etc and standard information associated with
them, eg phone numbers, emails, addresses. Even if this information is not
currently used by the app it is a good place to store it.

Anyway, my question is simply, is there a word for this style of thinking?

Thanks for reading if you got this far,
Michael



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