Learning Objectives
By the end of this lesson you will be able to:
- Explain how the Responsibility Gap forms step by step
- Identify the warning signs that a project is falling into the gap
- Articulate why this is a structural problem, not a people problem
How It Starts
Every data migration begins with the same optimistic assumption: extract the data, apply the business rules, load it into the target. Clean and straightforward.
Then the errors start coming back.
Some are easy - the ETL team fixes a mapping, reruns the job. But some errors cannot be resolved technically. They require a business decision:
- Which of these three conflicting records is the master?
- What does this field actually mean in a business context?
- Should we migrate this data at all, or leave it behind?
These questions get passed to the business.
The Cycle Forms
The business teams are usually not idle - they are in the middle of a system implementation, doing their day jobs, and now they are being asked to make hundreds of data decisions with little tooling and no clear process.
They resolve what they can. The rest sits in a queue. Or it goes back to IT with a question attached. IT waits. The job reruns. New errors appear. More questions go to the business.
The cycle looks like this:
- Source systems feed the ETL rules
- The load tool pushes data into the target
- The target rejects records - errors come back
- Errors land with the IT team
- Unresolvable issues pass to business users
- Unresolved decisions loop back into the ETL rules - and the cycle repeats
Each loop through this cycle takes time. The deadline does not move.
How the Gap Opens
As the cycle repeats, something predictable happens to the relationship between the two groups.
The business perspective: We are being buried in requests. IT keeps sending us lists of problems and expecting us to drop everything. We do not have the tools to analyse this properly. We are being set up to fail.
The IT perspective: We cannot move forward without answers. The business is not engaging. We are being blocked on things that are completely outside our control.
Both sides are telling the truth. Neither side is wrong. But both sides now believe the other should own the data quality problem - and neither has been given the mandate or the tools to own it unilaterally.
This is the Responsibility Gap.
It does not form because of bad intentions. It forms because the project was never explicit, up front, about where the IT-Business boundary was - and never gave either side the structure to manage it.
Why the Deadline Makes It Worse
As go-live approaches, the unresolved backlog forces a choice: delay the project, or migrate bad data.
Most organisations choose to migrate bad data, or to defer it - moving agreed minimum data sets and leaving the rest. Either way, the outcome is a target system that does not fully represent the business, with a legacy system that cannot be fully decommissioned.
The Responsibility Gap has not been closed. It has been papered over.
What PDM Does Differently
PDM’s answer to the Responsibility Gap is not to manage the relationship between the two sides more carefully. It is to remove the wall altogether: the business and IT work as a single virtual team with shared ownership of the data. There is no hand-off to negotiate, because there are no longer two separate sides.
Within that one team, PDM makes the work explicit from the start:
- Business data owners are identified and engaged before issues arise, not after
- Data quality issues are categorised and owned through a formal process (the Data Quality Rules (DQR) register - covered in Module 03 of the full course)
- The project structure gives both sides clear roles, tools, and escalation paths
PDM does this through Super-SMART tasks: tasks that build the individual while simultaneously building the team and delivering the migration. The gap does not disappear because people try harder. It disappears because the project draws individuals into the team, builds the team, and then delivers the project. This is the key differentiator of PDM, and how it works in practice is explained throughout the course.
Key Takeaways
- The Responsibility Gap is a structural problem created by poorly designed projects, not by disengaged people
- It forms when data quality issues require business decisions but the business has no process, tooling, or capacity to handle them at scale
- The loop of unresolved issues, combined with a fixed deadline, forces bad outcomes
- PDM closes the gap by forming a single virtual team and making the work explicit from day one - there is no wall left to manage
Book Reference
Practical Data Migration by Johny Morris (BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT): Chapter 1, “Data Migration - What’s All the Fuss”.