In the week leading up to this year’s MIT Chief Data Officer Information Quality Symposium, SiliconANGLE presented a series previewing the event, themed ‘Big Data Demands Good Data’. Our series focused on presenting a synopsis of some of the important topics scheduled to be covered in Cambridge the following week.

While prior to the event I wrote on two aspects of how data quality and its continued improvement can help steer the financial services sector, today we are re-visiting the presentation offered by David Hay and Tom Redman. Hay is the President of Essential Strategies, Inc. and Redman is President of Havasink Enterprises. This joint presentation is entitled ‘Channels of Information and Financial Regulation’.

Their session highlighted how employing cybernetics, (as it applies to management), can be a useful way to clear out excess data noise to receive clear and actionable intelligence. A major source of poor information quality is derived from generated feedback data.

On SiliconANGLEs the CUBE, which live streamed interviews and information from the symposium, Dave Vellante and Paul Gillin welcomed Justin Magruder, President and Senior Managing Director at Noetic Partners, a group that works with organizations in the financial sector to help collect and analyze their data with the intent of helping streamline the operation.

And Magruder doesn’t just think better data management is a vehicle for streamlining an organization’s efficiency. As he stated in his interview, “Data quality, and more specifically, the lack of data, was a fundamental component of the financial crisis.”

You can see the full interview here:

Magruder’s assertion was echoed in an earlier interview when, on the previous day, Vellante and Jeff Kelly, a Big Data analyst with Wikibon, sat down with Tony O’Brien, associate lecturer at the Sheffield Business School.

Writing on the interview, which can be seen in its entirety here:

SiliconANGLEs own Valentina Craft summarized O’Brien’s comments on this issue stating, “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.”

Kelly and Vellante also welcomed Derek Strauss, for whom the position of CDO was created at TD Ameritrade. During their conversation, Strauss commented he believed he was one among just a handful of executives in the financial sector with the CDO title. He estimated perhaps less than 10 percent of companies had such a position.

This figure, especially when considered against the two previous interviews referenced above, might connote financial service companies may not have as yet embraced the importance of data management and the extraction of quality data.

In Strauss’ interview, which you can watch here:

Strauss goes on to discuss how the role of CDO, at least for TD Ameritrade, was enterprise wide. The implementation of a new executive level position can often create internecine ground wars between different groups within the organization. Strauss credits his success to several factors. Among them, he reports to the COO. Another component to a seamless transition was Strauss’ being peers with, rather than directly over, the IT department.

With many professionals predicting the next financial crisis will be seen among credit unions, there are some who believe the immediate commitment to embracing big data and information quality could lessen or even negate that possibility.

For these and all other theCUBE interviews, please visit our YouTube channel. Be sure to also give our previous round-up in this series, on the healthcare industry, a quick read.