How Do I Know This Data Is Right? | Jonathan Agee, Validatar

Jonathan Agee 0:03 Are we on?

David Sweenor 0:05 Oh, we’re on.

Jonathan Agee 0:06 We are on.

David Sweenor 0:08 Hello, and welcome to the Data Faces podcast on location. We’re coming to you live from the CDO IQ Symposium in Cambridge, Massachusetts, right next to MIT. So I am joined right now by Jonathan Agee, founder, CEO of Validatar. Jonathan, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, David. Appreciate it. So can you just tell us a little bit about yourself, what you do, and Validatar?

Jonathan Agee 0:36 Yeah, I’d be happy to. So I’m Jonathan Agee. I’ve had the privilege of being The leader and CEO here at Validatar for the last four years. Before that, I spent about 15 years in the data and analytics consulting world. So Validatar was born out of our experience in what data projects needed in terms of how do you build trust in the ultimate product of those projects, which is the data. Okay. You’re going to production and your stakeholders and users are always asking the question, how do I know this is right?

David Sweenor 1:16 Okay.

Jonathan Agee 1:17 And so we built Validatar to help answer that question.

David Sweenor 1:20 I love that. And so part of the name of this show, the name of the show is Data Faces. So before your professional LinkedIn profile existed, what did you want to be when you grew up?

Jonathan Agee 1:30 Oh, man. Before consulting, before all of that, before I went to college, I dreamed about flying airplanes and being an astronaut or something like that. I ended up deciding that wasn’t for me and stuff like that. I still love when I’m flying in a plane, looking down on the world and all that, but now I’ve seen a lot of the world through data and enjoy that part as well.

David Sweenor 1:58 Now you’re flying through data. Exactly. All right, so we’re at sort of a data quality event here, right? Information quality is in the name. What would you say is the state of data quality just across all of your clients and just the conversations you’ve had here? Give us a letter grade.

Jonathan Agee 2:19 Yeah, a letter grade. Well, I think that it is confused. Okay. I think that many people… I say that, I mean… Data quality has never been more in the spotlight than now, I think. AI has certainly brought that to the forefront in terms of garbage in, garbage out, and with less guardrails around the people being the ones that are looking at the outcome every step of the process. So with that, then where are we at data quality wise? I think that we have some people that are doing quite well.

David Sweenor 3:01 Okay.

Jonathan Agee 3:01 And then we have others that are really struggling and lagging behind to keep up with that. So we feel like we’re in a really key part of the industry here to answer that question. Okay.

David Sweenor 3:16 I’m not going to let you off the hook though. So on average, we’re going to give you a letter grade. The industry, you know, everybody you’ve talked to.

Jonathan Agee 3:23 You know, we’ve only got leaders and laggards. Yeah. I’d probably say we’re in, like, a C. Okay. That’s fair enough. Yeah, I think so.

David Sweenor 3:33 All right, so with all these challenges that are out there, how does Validatar help organizations overcome some of these challenges?

Jonathan Agee 3:40 Yeah, so we are really focused on giving folks the software platform to help them automate all aspects of data quality. Now we kind of add to the word data quality assurance. Okay. Because we bring, you know, data quality assurance. Right. So we bring to that the idea that, you know, we need to do more prevention than just addressing the data quality only in production. Okay. Right. And so we’re big believers in kind of a full lifecycle approach to how we think about data quality. And when we talk about that, we mean, you know, starting in the development lifecycle in QA as you’re building data product, preparing that really well and having robust processes that are going to validate not just the data, but that the code and the processes are all producing a good outcome. Right. Which is ultimately the data.

David Sweenor 4:37 Okay. And is when organizations think about this, is this a software only solution or is there a lot of organizational change that needs to happen in conjunction with this?

Jonathan Agee 4:52 So we provide mainly the software. We obviously help you get started and enable you, but this is absolutely an organizational shift in terms of how people are thinking about data quality in terms of thinking, you know, most organizations, frankly, they’re approach to data quality has been highly manual okay up to today you know especially to testing and validation right this has been highly manual okay and so wrapping your mind around wrapping your organizational processes around what does it look like to have automation at every step of the process and and being able to scale that to meet kind of today’s volume and diversity of data and all of that where we can apply automation, it requires some new thinking.

David Sweenor 5:40 Okay, okay. Well, where can people find more about you, Validatar, and the software solution?

Jonathan Agee 5:47 Yeah, so Validatar, we’re validatar.com. Okay. Pretty easy. But you can find more from me on LinkedIn at my LinkedIn profile. Just search Jonathan Agee Validatar and you’ll find me pretty easily. I post pretty regularly there, my thoughts and content as well.

David Sweenor 6:06 Okay, well, perfect. Well, Jonathan Agee, founder and CEO of Validatar, coming to you live from the CDO IAQ event in Boston. Cheers.