Data Stewardship

Definition

• Formal Accountability: Establishes clear business responsibilities for the effective control and use of data assets.
• Data Steward Role: A business leader or subject matter expert who is accountable for managing data assets.
• Management of Data Assets: Data stewards manage data on behalf of the organization, ensuring it’s used effectively and in the organization’s best interests.
• Stakeholder Representation: Data stewards represent the data interests of all stakeholders, including their own departments and divisions.
• Data Protection and Management: They protect, manage, and leverage data resources.
• Enterprise Perspective: Data stewards must adopt an enterprise-wide view to ensure the quality and effective use of data across the organization.

Activities

• Creating and Managing Core Metadata: Involves defining and managing business terminology, valid data values, and other essential metadata. Stewards often manage the organization’s Business Glossary, which serves as the authoritative source for business terms related to data.
• Documenting Rules and Standards: Entails defining and documenting business rules, data standards, and data quality rules. Stewards ensure that these rules, based on the business processes that generate or use data, are well understood and consistently applied across the organization.
• Managing Data Quality Issues: Involves identifying and resolving data-related issues or facilitating their resolution.
• Executing Operational Data Governance Activities: Stewards ensure that data governance policies and initiatives are followed in daily operations and projects, influencing decisions to align data management practices with the organization’s overall goals.

Roles

• Chief Data Stewards:

  • May chair data governance bodies or act as a Chief Data Officer (CDO) in a virtual or distributed data governance organization.
  • Can also be Executive Sponsors.

• Executive Data Stewards:

  • Senior managers who participate in a Data Governance Council.

• Enterprise Data Stewards:

  • Oversee a data domain across business functions.

• Business Data Stewards:

  • Subject matter experts responsible for a subset of data (Data Owner).
  • Work with stakeholders to define and control data.
  • A Data Owner is a type of Business Data Steward with approval authority for data decisions within their domain.

• Technical Data Stewards:

  • IT professionals in roles such as Data Integration Specialists, Database Administrators, Business Intelligence Specialists, Data Quality Analysts, or Metadata Administrators.

• Coordinating Data Stewards:

  • Lead and represent teams of business and technical Data Stewards.
  • Important for discussions across teams and with executive Data Stewards, especially in large organizations.