CHAPTER 7
Reactive Organizations: Trying to Get Beyond Crisis Mode
Man is not imprisoned by habit. Great changes in him can be wrought by crisis—once that crisis can be recognized and understood.
—NORMAN COUSINS, 20TH CENTURY MAGAZINE EDITOR
EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW
Characteristics of a Reactive Organization
• Think globally, act locally
• Presence of data management technology, but with limited data quality deployment
• Siloed data leading to many views of what should be the same data
• Awareness of data problems only after a crisis occurs
Technology Adoption
• Data warehouse
• Enterprise resource planning (ERP)
• Customer relationship management (CRM)
• Data integration tools
Business Capabilities
• Line of business influences IT projects
• Little cross-functional collaboration
• High cost to maintain multiple applications
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REMEMBER
1. Data quality and data governance should never be considered a one-time project. A quality culture must be established as an ongoing, continuous process.
2. No organization can tackle enterprise-wide data quality and data governance all at once. To be successful, your journey must be evolutionary. Start small and take achievable steps that can be measured along the way.
Have you ever had one of those jobs where you thought, If I can just get ahead of this crisis, things will really turn around and it will be smooth sailing? From a data standpoint, that describes ...

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