Data quality was the focus of many conversations at Big Data LDN.

While you may feel ready for AI tools – and already use them when your colleagues aren’t looking – your data may not be.

The big concern in the data industry is the need to build greater awareness around ‘clean’ and ‘usable’ data. Before charging ahead with AI strategies, businesses need to ensure the data being used is good enough to do its job and avoid bad results.

“We describe it as ‘garbage in, garbage out’,” Gaurav Patole, principal consultant at technology consultancy Thoughtworks, told Communicate magazine. “Data quality is about ensuring your data is trustworthy, usable and suited for consumption.

“If your data is not good, your business decisions and outcomes won’t be good.”

A study by research firm Gartner found 70% of AI programmes fail due to the poor quality of data being fed into them. “Having a good quality of data is the foundation for any business today,” Patole said.  

This conversation has moved away from being only an ‘IT problem’, as Patole calls it, towards being a broader ‘business problem’. “Businesses need to own the issue of data quality as it’s growing to become an issue that’s wider than the IT team. It’s a very easy, straightforward concept, but not often adopted by business leaders today.

“Today, there is a missing link between IT departments and the rest of an organisation.”

Putting good quality data into the hands of those making business decisions was another of the challenges raised by Big Data LDN exhibitors. “The biggest challenges are how do we get good data into AI, and how do you get AI into a good data source,” Chandrashekar Lalapet Srinivas Prasanna (LSP), managing director at Zoho Canada, told Communicate magazine. “This is what organisations, and a lot of decision makers, are struggling with, because the hype is real, the buzz is real – so how can they use AI to impact business outcomes?

“For those using AI, it requires a ‘crawl, walk, run’ approach.”

Data usage transparency was another theme of serious discussion at Big Data LDN. Maria Torres, portfolio management leader at the Bank of England, told Communicate magazine that transparency was vital for building trust with stakeholders. She hopes that organisations will prioritise making their data strategies inclusive: “This is important because better diversity will generate better outcomes.”

When asked whether she thought this was a topic being taken as seriously beyond events such as Big Data LDN, Torres said it was a steady process. “It is an emerging topic, similar to sustainability. It is beginning to become embedded in the data world and in the technical side as a key aspect of developing growth in this area.

“I’m very optimistic that both of those topics – diversity and inclusion, and sustainability – will be embedded in long-term in the roles of data leaders across industries.”