An unfortunate habit in many organizations is for everyone to put the burden of responsibility on someone else or a different department. This is often the case when it comes to data quality -- the administrative staff thinks it's IT's problem, while IT argues that the business division is the one using the customer information and so should be more involved in managing the records with a contact data quality solution.

In a post for his Obsessive-Compulsive Data Quality blog, Jim Harris notes that it's really everyone's responsibility, and that achieving a database free of duplications, errors, uncompleted fields and other issues requires interdepartmental teamwork.

"Neither the Business nor IT alone has all of the necessary knowledge and resources required to truly be successful," Harris says. "Data quality requires that the Business and IT forge an ongoing and iterative collaboration."

Once the company leaders have determined that everyone will need to work together to overhaul the database, they'll need to actually convince employees to do so.

There's no single solution to inspiring teamwork, Harris acknowledges, so management will need to assess their company's unique culture and analyze how people interact with each other, as well as the organization's size, capability and maturity.