The Family Circus and Data Quality

Like many young intellectuals, the only part of the Sunday newspaper I read growing up was the color comics section, and one of my favorite comic strips was The Family Circus created by cartoonist Bil Keane.  One of the recurring themes of the comic strip was a set of invisible gremlins that the children used to shift blame for any misdeeds, including Ida Know, Not Me, and Nobody.

Although I no longer read any section of the newspaper on any day of the week, this Sunday morning I have been contemplating how this same set of invisible gremlins is used by many people throughout most organizations to shift blame for any incidents when poor data quality negatively impacted business activities, especially since, when investigating the root cause, you often find that Ida Know owns the data, Not Me is accountable for data governance, and Nobody takes responsibility for data quality.