The Sum of the Parts Is Greater than the Whole
The data capability problem in most fashion organisations is not a shortage of understanding. It is a surplus of partial understandings that never add up to a shared one. Every function has a piece. But the pieces don't connect.
This is not a collaboration failure in the conventional sense. The meetings happen. The cross-functional projects are stood up. The willingness, in most organisations, is genuine. What tends to be absent is something more fundamental — a shared understanding of what the data is actually for, and who is accountable when it falls short.
Without that, collaboration produces activity rather than capability.
The fragmentation has a particular texture in this industry. Each function experiences the data problem through its own position in the organisation. The cost lands differently depending on where you sit — in the claims that can't be substantiated, the sourcing decisions made without the information they needed. Each function sees its own version of the gap. None of them sees the whole.
What makes this costly is not the fragmentation itself. It is what the combination would be worth if the pieces connected. An organisation that genuinely knows its products — their composition, their provenance — has built something that reaches well beyond any single function's contribution. The compliance piece follows from it. So does the competitive one.
That combination is what most organisations have not yet made. Not because the pieces are missing. Because nobody has been given the mandate to connect them.
Shared data ownership sounds straightforward until an organisation tries to establish it. The difficulty is not technical. It is that the conditions it requires — shared definitions, real accountability — each cross boundaries that functions have historically managed independently.
A shared definition of something as apparently simple as material composition requires Finance, Sustainability, Legal, and Procurement to agree on what they mean when they use the term — and to hold that agreement when commercial pressure makes a looser interpretation more convenient. That conversation has rarely been had. The functions proceed on the assumption that they are working from the same understanding. They are often not.
Accountability is harder still. Nominal ownership — the data governance role that appears on an org chart without the mandate or resources to match — is common. Real accountability, where someone carries the end-to-end integrity of product data with the authority to hold it across functions and supplier relationships, is rare. The gap between those two things is where the data quality problem lives.
The value locked in what these functions already hold is not hypothetical. It compounds when connected — each function's contribution making the others more useful, the whole emerging as something none of them could produce alone. Not a technology asset. Not a compliance asset. An organisational one — built from decisions made across functions, sustained across seasons, held in place by leadership that understands what it is worth.
Every function sees its own part of the landscape. That is not a failure of vision — it is the natural consequence of functional accountability. The only part of the organisation with sight across all of it is the leadership team. The leadership team alone can see what the pieces add up to, and what the combination would be worth. That visibility is not optional. It comes with the role. So does the responsibility to act on it.
The decision to build it is available to any organisation willing to make it. Most haven't. Not because it is beyond reach. Because it has never been named as a decision that is owned by leadership rather than a problem that belongs to functions.
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.
Photo by Hans Tilstra on Unsplash