In manufacturing this type of role used be carried out by the quality control team, who inspected products from the production line, identified defects and then rejected some or all of the batch.

Good manufacturing businesses moved away from quality control and to quality assurance. They learned that it is possible to make things right first time, every time and that this saves megabucks.

Sadly the world of information management is still back in the dark ages of “quality control”, where business functions and processes can be performed in a manner that allows inaccurate and incorrect data to be captured or created along the way. Then the business has to spend time and money finding and correcting this data, while at the same time suffering the losses and inefficiencies caused by the bad data.

It is true that the quality is the responsibility of everybody. But instead of saying “people must do better”, enterprises should be saying “the process must do better” and enforce (and enable) the capture of accurate data first time as an integrated part of the function / process.

Where accuracy cannot be enforced first time, there should be a “feedback” loop that forces the creator of the inaccurate data to correct it or charges them for the time taken by other people to correct it.

Nobody ever asks “Who owns the money?” Cash flows through the organisation and wherever people are empowered to use it they are responsible and accountable for proper stewardship of that resource. Just because companies have accountants doesn’t mean the sole responsibility rests with them.

Data custodians and data stewards stand in the same relationship to the resource that is data – and every person in the organisation has a duty of care for that resource while it is in their hands, just as they would if if it were money

- and in a very real sense – it is!

Keep spreading the word!!

Gary Palmer, Chief Alchemist, Information Alchemy