Data Quality and the Responsibility Parable

Our leadership and CIOs have been talking quite a bit lately about data quality. When talking to CIOs about it, the responses are all over the map. This is partially due to the varying authority and expectations placed on them by the local district's administration. One task in the effort to ensure high-quality data is to increase awareness, and there's been quite a bit of that taking place. Somewhere along the way, though, awareness has to be converted into action. The whole situation reminds me of the "responsibility parable", which you can find all over the web and is stated something like this:

Once upon a time, there were four people;
Their names were Everybody, Somebody, Nobody and Anybody.
Whenever there was an important job to be done, Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it.
Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it.
When Nobody did it, Everybody got angry because it was Everybody's job.
Everybody thought that Somebody would do it, but Nobody realized that Nobody would do it.
So consequently Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done in the first place.

I think it's worth keeping this in mind, whether your issues relate to data quality or any technology initiative. This could be applied to proper technology planning and evaluation, open work orders that the whole department knows about or just about any task or great idea that's brought up in a group. We all have so much going on that it's easy to assume that just because everyone is "aware", then "someone" must be taking care of it. Are they?
[Image: I got it from http://fyimusic.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Blaming-each-other.jpg]

If it isn't easy, it won't get done (or used)

I had planned on making a blog entry describing how to map my SkyDrive to a local drive letter. As it turns out, there are many blog entries describing the same thing. Search for yourselves and you'll have no problem finding instructions. Most instructions I've found involve getting your alphanumeric ID for the folder in question and then changing the mapping text to some URL involving docs.live.com or something similar. Then, perhaps you change forward slashes to backslashes and remove https and add a ^2Documents or some similar text and are you really going to do this? THEN, I scroll down to read comments on these write-ups only to find users saying that (1) it didn't work and/or (2) it is so slow that the user gave up or removed the mapping.

All of this, mind you, to map 25GB of storage to a local drive. I'm a fairly technical user and I have chosen not to bother with it. I can only assume that most non-technical users won't bother.

So, I shifted gears and thought I'd check out the price of USB flash drive storage. Naturally, I'm working off the assumption that I want easy access to some amount of storage, which theoretically caused my need to map that drive in the first place. As of today, I can go to a big-box store and get an 8GB flash drive for $10. Personally, the bigger problem will be keeping up with the flash drive rather than finding the $10 for 8GB of storage. That's a whole other matter.

For history's sake, I wanted to see how much prices had dropped over the years. Here's a Black Friday ad from 2008 where I can get a super deal of 8GB for about $20. Mind you, this was Black Friday and the retail price ($10 on 11/4/11) was $50 about 3 years ago.

Even more interesting was a look back at a 1996 Best Buy flyer. USRobotics 33.6 modem for $160? You bet! $130 for a 16MB memory upgrade. $400 (after $30 mail-in rebate) for a 3.1 GB hard drive. $70 for a Uniden 30-message pager. I wore a pager at one time! Would kids today even get the Dr. Beeper references in Caddyshack?

Ah, I digress... but I'm not mapping my SkyDrive to a local drive - not today, anyway.