I work at a company that thinks extremely deeply about interoperability issues and everybody is on the opposite side: it can be said that we were made as a response to xkcd 927, to try and solve the issue.
I think the company is right in that semantic decentralization with interoperability would be a good end goal, but I think just plain darwinism explains the necessity of the opposite.
Not a great example of a single centralised system. The errors came from trying to write custom reconciliation code between two systems, the ERP and the bank - perfect example of the problems OP raises.