In the aftermath of Valentine's Day, after recovering from too much chocolate, recycling the greeting cards and throwing away the wilted flowers, take a moment to explore your emotions regarding your company's data. If you have no opinions or feelings about the mission-critical customer contacts and other data in the system, there may be a problem.

As Jim Harris, blogger-in-chief of the Obsessive-Compulsive Data Quality blog, writes, the issue could be that you're just not that into your data. But everyone in the organization needs to get involved and embrace the necessary culture change.

Harris explains that the origin of most data quality initiatives -- be they list cleansing, deduplication or some other project -- rests with a data-driven decision that resulted in a negative outcome. However, starting a program for that reason alone can lead to failure, he warns, and employees and executives alike need to invest themselves in overhauling the information, making it an asset to their individual jobs and the business as a whole. 

"Some fail because of lofty expectations or unmanaged scope creep," Harris says, explaining the causes that make DQ projects go awry. "Most fail because they are based on the flawed perspective that data quality problems can be permanently 'fixed' by a one-time project as opposed to needing a sustained program."