A friend of Datadoodle recalls this story: He stood before a room full of IT people who worked on mainframes and asked them, “‘How many of you feel responsibility for the quality of the data?'”
Not one raised a hand. He said to them, “OK, now you’re the CIO and I’m a salesman. And I say, ‘You know how those guys are always telling you that you can’t get your data off that old clunky thing? Well, they just want to keep their jobs. You need to get your data off that old-fashioned thing.'”
One day the mainframe is gone in favor of a $10 million replacement. Three years later, the company’s still got transaction glitches. He says to the IT people, “One morning you’ll pick up the paper and you’ll read about it, and you’ll say, ‘If only they still had that old mainframe!'”
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