Don't try to hide the data quality problems; show business the implications of poor data quality, she said.

Duke believes many business problems with data quality can be avoided.

"You must have a champion with clearly defined responsibilities," she said. "Remove turf wars; don't have a data quality team, because data quality is everyone's responsibility."

Duke stressed that business, not IT, "owns" data quality, because the key issue to better exploitation of data resources is making people aware of what is available.

"It's hard to convince IT they need to let go, but giving control to business means [its execs] are less likely to ignore these issues," she said, adding that business often doesn't realize the wealth of information that is hidden in their data.