Technology Was Never the Problem
Nobody has told her that the difference matters.
The platform is live. The data fields are populated. And a product manager is copying last season's material composition figures into this season's record because gathering them fresh would take three days she doesn't have.
That moment — unremarkable, invisible, repeated across functions and seasons — is where data quality is actually determined. Not in the technology decision. Not in the implementation project. In the daily calculation that every person who touches a data record makes about what the data is worth and what it costs to get it right.
No system changes that calculation. Only the organisation can.
The shift from treating data as a byproduct to treating it as an asset is not, at its core, a technology transition. It is a behavioural one. Behavioural change in organisations is slow and uneven. It depends almost entirely on what people understand to be expected of them — not from a policy document, but from what they observe being valued, challenged, and acted on by the people around them.
In an organisation that has not made that shift, the questions people ask about data tend to be procedural. Has the field been completed? Has the form been submitted? The standard is presence, not accuracy. The goal is closure, not quality. Data is something to be gathered and filed, its work done when the requirement that prompted its collection has been satisfied.
The questions look different in an organisation that has. Is this figure still accurate, or has something changed in the supply chain since it was entered? If a regulator or a procurement team asked us to substantiate this claim tomorrow, could we? Those are not compliance questions. They are asset management questions. They reflect a different understanding of what the data is for and what its failure costs.
The difference shows up most clearly at the points where the two kinds of organisation diverge in practice. The brief stage, where a design team specifies a material without asking whether its provenance can be traced to the depth a passport will require. The sourcing negotiation, where data quality is traded away for a margin improvement without anyone calculating what that trade will cost downstream.
In each of those moments, the person making the decision is not being careless. They are responding rationally to what the organisation has signalled matters. If data quality has never been the reason a brief was sent back, it will not be treated as a reason to slow the brief down. If a sourcing decision has never been challenged on data grounds, data will not enter the sourcing calculation. The culture of an organisation on data is not what its values statement says. It is the accumulation of those moments and how they were handled.
What changes when an organisation genuinely shifts is not the systems or even the processes, though both tend to follow. What changes first is the questions. A sustainability manager who asks not just whether a supplier has submitted data but whether what was submitted reflects what is actually in the product. A procurement lead who asks not just whether a supplier met the price point but whether the relationship is producing data the organisation can stand behind.
Those questions create friction. That friction is the point. It signals, more clearly than any policy or training session, that data quality is a dimension of professional judgement in this organisation — not a compliance task delegated to someone else.
Building that signal into the ordinary rhythm of operations is the work. It is slower than a system implementation and less visible than a project milestone. It does not have a completion date. But it is the only thing that makes the technology investment compound rather than depreciate — because a system populated by people who understand what the data is for produces something qualitatively different from one populated by people treating it as a field to be completed.
The technology was never the problem. It was always waiting for the organisation to catch up with it.
Michael Shea is a digital excellence advisor, non-executive director, and leadership coach working with organisations navigating the human and technical dimensions of digital transformation. He hosts The Aeolian Discourse and writes at The Aeolian.