ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

If you measure success by the opportunity to work on something new and important, with courageous, smart, and caring people, then no one has been more successful than me. I started work on data quality at the great Bell Labs and AT&T before most knew what it was and long before anyone knew how important it would turn out to be. We sorted out some fundamental points and proved that “getting in front” is the superior approach to data quality, setting a path for others. Plenty of companies had the same problem, but none the vision of Bell Labs.

It’s been my pleasure and privilege to work with thousands of great people since then. Among them are a few “provocateurs,” those first to take up the “getting in front” approach in their industries and companies and prove its efficacy. If Bell Labs and AT&T created a path, the provocateurs helped pave it. All who follow are in their debt. While this path is certainly not easy—indeed many find it counterintuitive—the basic approaches, methods, tools, and benefits are available to all.

To continue the analogy, my goal with Getting in Front on Data: Who Does What is to illuminate the path, especially where the trail begins. Think of each instruction as a lamppost. Hundreds of people have contributed in some way or other. I thank them all.

I’m gratified to see a cadre of younger people replacing graybeards like me, as data only grows more pervasive and more important. Social media and smart, connected devices are but two examples. I expect recent generations to widen the path into a superhighway, paving it, making it smoother and faster.

I don’t like the seemingly required “naming of names” in Acknowledgements. I’ve already noted that hundreds, maybe thousands, of people have contributed and I’m bound to leave someone out. But the thing that bothers me is that naming everyone obscures the biggest contributors, who don’t get the full credit they deserve. So, the risk of offense aside, the following have most impacted my own thinking and practice: Bob Pautke, the first data quality provocateur; Jeff MacMillan, the first provocateur outside AT&T; Nikki Chang; Sarah Cliffe; Karl Fleischmann; John Fleming; Steve Hassmann; Liz Kirscher; Arnold Lent; Anany Levitin; Dennis Parton; and Lwanga Yonke.

Jennifer Daniels pushed me hard to make this the most concise and powerful book I could. Wow, was she tough! Tadhg Nagle, Bob Pautke, Dave Sammon, and Ken Self read early drafts and offered support. Andy O’Connell helped organize the material and sharpen it.

Next, my children and, later, their spouses and, still later, their children, have endured, usually with good humor, thousands of little experiments as I tried to understand how data quality management applied to family life.

Finally, Nancy. I’ll never know why she cast her lot with a dreary statistician-in-training. But she’s stood shoulder-to-shoulder with me for 40 years. I’m dead-certain my life is better because of her. I hope she feels the same way about me though I’m considerably less certain of that!