Dave Vellante and Jeff Kelly, theCUBE co-hosts, broadcasted live from the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as part of this year’s Chief Data Officer and Information Quality (CDOIQ) Symposium.

The explosion of Big Data triggered an explosion in attendance, attracting more information quality professionals (practitioners, vendors and educators) than in years past.

The Symposium for Chief Data Officers tackles several hot topics, such as Information Quality and Data Governance. They are increasingly becoming top-of-mind subjects, just as the topic of security has been in the past. To cover these trends, Vellante and Kelly asked Tony O’Brien, associate lecturer at Sheffield Business School, to come and sit for a short interview.

During his 40 years experience in finance, O’Brien was able to observe several problems, stating that “a lot of them manifest themselves from poor data, and it’s always bad news.”

As a business finance practitioner, he found that poor data was often the root of the problem. But in many instances, management tended to blame the applications or the system, rather than the data itself.

Talking about the practical case study, Vellante pressed for details pertaining to how they they addressed the problem. “We tackled from the software issue, in terms of non-technical side. The organization implemented an ERP system in the late ’90s, but it didn’t solve the data problems, which persisted. One of the things we realized, as early doers, was if you want to resolve a problem, then you have to start measuring it.” A baseline was needed. So they decided to cascade it through the organization.

The big breakthrough was when, over a period of five months they were visiting 48 factories and they organized meetings and focus groups with the people working there. They found the workers actually wanted to make the improvements, so they started using Action Research.

Tony O’Brien heard at the conference from another speaker’s presentation the statement that “Data Quality Is Not A Project”, and he wholeheartedly agrees.

Make sure you watch the entire interview below. Tony O’Brien is an Associate Lecturer with the Sheffield Business School.