Everyone is in data. But only one team gets the blame when it breaks.
You’ve heard “everyone is in sales.” The same is true for data. Sales enters it. Finance reports on it. Marketing segments by it. Operations create it.
But when 77% of organizations rate their data quality as average or worse, the data team catches the blame. Not the sales rep who skipped three required fields. Not the ops manager running shadow spreadsheets. Not the finance lead who built a parallel truth in Excel.
Data quality isn’t a data team problem. It’s a company problem that lands on the data team’s desk.
The fix isn’t better tooling for one team. It’s shared accountability across all of them.
That means: producers own quality at the source. Consumers define what “good” looks like. Contracts make expectations explicit. And leadership treats data hygiene like they treat financial hygiene, everyone’s job, with consequences.
The companies with great data in 2026 won’t be the ones with the biggest data teams. They’ll be the ones where everyone knows they’re in data.
Which department would be most surprised to learn they’re “in data”?