The Data Chief | Episode 98

Is Data Quality the Biggest Threat to Humanity? With Barr Moses and Olga Maydanchik

Barr Moses

CEO and Co-Founder

Monte Carlo

Olga Maydanchik

Data Quality Expert

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Current EpisodeEP98: Is Data Quality the Biggest Threat to Humanity? With Barr Moses and Olga Maydanchik
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Episode Overview

Barr Moses, CEO and Founder of Monte Carlo, and Olga Maydanchik, Data Quality Expert, join host, Cindi Howson, to dig into what expert Larry English once described as the biggest threat to humanity: data quality. In today’s world, data is what drives competitive advantage. But what happens if it’s not accurate? Barr and Olga dive into the true size of the problem, and share their advice for business and data leaders, as they navigate this challenge.

Key Moments:

  • Why is the data wrong? (6:00)
  • Our products are our data (11:00)
  • The true size of the data quality problem (14:00)
  • Clean your data before you prioritize shiny new tools (26:00)
  • The next frontier: GenAI and unstructured data (31:00)

Key Quotes: 

The data estate has changed significantly. But the way in which we manage data and data quality specifically has not adapted. – Barr Moses

I tracked every single change in the data that I made, and could calculate how much money a company saved after a data cleanup. For a mid-size company, the difference was approximately a quarter of a billion dollars. For a large company, it could be several billion dollars. 45% of the data I cleaned had errors. – Olga Maydanchik

The competitive advantage is really the access to your proprietary data that you have as an enterprise. So you need to make sure that that data is accurate, reliable, and on time. Now, how do you do that? That's something that people are still figuring out. – Barr Moses

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Bio: 

Barr Moses:
Barr Moses is the CEO and Co-Founder of Monte Carlo, the data reliability company. Monte Carlo is the creator of the industry's first end-to-end Data Observability platform. She is also co-author of O'Reilly's Data Quality Fundamentals: Building Reliable Data Pipelines. Previously, she was VP Customer Operations at Gainsight, a management consultant at Bain & Company and served in the Israeli Air Force as a commander of an intelligence data analyst unit.

Olga Maydanchik:
Olga Maydanchik is a data governance, data quality, and data architecture thought leader and practitioner. She is an expert in design and implementation of enterprise-wide data management programs, who has led data quality efforts at Deutsche Bank, AIG, and at Citi.