No owner, no responsibility

How many times do you find something that is not working as it should be, and after digging around you find it has no clear owner?

That could be no owner at all, or shared ownership (which thanks to the bystander effect is effectively the same).

There are many reasons why this happens, but the most common would be an organisational change.

We see this problem everywhere in an organisation, but particularly with data, where a dataset in a data warehouse or a data pipeline that created some key data finds itself with no clear owner.

With no owner, that means no one is responsible for it, which means:

• No maintenance
• No incident response
• No compliance accountability

So, it’s critical to spot places where there is no clear owner and assign an owner for them - however hard that might be.