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]