Why Leaders Don’t Trust Their Data - And What To Do About It
In this episode of the Data Reliability Experience (DRE) Show by iceDQ, Neutrino Advisory CEO Rahul Agaskar joins Subu Desaraju, CCO at iceDQ, to dig into a problem every executive recognizes: leaders say data is the fuel for growth, yet they still do not fully trust it.
Rahul explains how many enterprises still treat data quality as a one‑time “clean-up” exercise at the reporting layer, rather than an operational discipline embedded across ingestion, transformation, and consumption. Subu builds on this with vivid analogies from manufacturing and baking: you cannot expect a flawless “cake” if you never check the ingredients or process until it comes out of the oven.
Together, they explore why traditional “check-at-the-end” testing is breaking down in an era of exploding data sources, streaming pipelines, and AI models trained on constantly changing inputs. The conversation covers how to shift data quality left, treat data as a product, engineer reliability into pipelines, and think about the ROI of data quality in terms of avoided revenue leakage, reduced remediation costs, and lower regulatory risk.
We close the episode with a forward-looking discussion on data observability, testing, and monitoring, and the cultural changes leaders need to drive so their teams feel safe flagging data issues early, before trust erodes in the boardroom.
Key topics discussed
- Why many organizations still treat data quality as a “cleanup exercise” and how that mindset limits maturity.
- Why “check-at-the-end” data testing breaks down with today’s volume, velocity, and variety of data.
- What “shift-left” means in practice and how other industries (manufacturing/quality engineering) approach it.
- Data-as-a-product thinking: ownership, accountability, confidence in metrics, and consistent outputs.
- The role of testing, monitoring, and observability in preventing downstream failures.
- AI readiness and why “reliable AI starts with reliable data.”
- How leaders should think about ROI: opportunity cost, revenue leakage, customer impact, remediation, and risk.
Who should watch
- CIOs, CDOs, heads of data/analytics and data engineering.
- Leaders responsible for dashboards, forecasting, governance, and AI adoption.
- Teams dealing with recurring data incidents, last-minute reporting fixes, or metric disputes.
About the speakers
Rahul Agaskar is the CEO of Neutrino Advisory, where he works with organizations on digital strategy, transformation, and growth at the intersection of business, data, and execution.
Subu Desaraju is Chief Commercial Officer at iceDQ and works with enterprise teams to build confidence and trust in their data through data reliability practices.
Links
Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akLZlIDqnLE
Podcast series:
Data Reliability Experience (DRE) Show by iceDQ: https://youtube.com/@icedq
This conversation is part of the Data Reliability Experience (DRE) Show by iceDQ. Learn more about iceDQ’s approach to data reliability here: http://icedq.com