Data Stewardship
Data stewardship is a way to describe the accountabilities and responsibilities of data and related processes to ensure effective and efficient control of the use of data assets.
The main focus of data stewardship is as follows:
• Creating and managing core metadata: The metadata includes business terminology, data about data, business glossary, etc.
• Standards: Business rules and standards are applied across different domains consistently at the enterprise level. Stewards help surface these business rules and standards to ensure that there is consensus about them within the organization.
• Managing data issues: Stewards are responsible for the identification and resolution of data-related issues. Data issues are identified, raised, and resolved though governance committees and prioritized through data programs in the governance council.
• Operations: Day-to-day operations of data governance activities ensure policies, procedures, and initiatives are adhered to. They enable data ownership decisions to ensure data is managed to support goals of the organization.
Models of Data Stewardship
All organizations have different kinds of data needs. As the organization evolves, different systems, technologies, skills, and processes also evolve.
There are different models of data stewardship. Which models to apply in an organization depends on multiple factors, like organization structure, organization culture, and industry. Regulations are some of the factors in deciding the governance framework.
Model 1: Data Steward by Subject Area
As per this model of stewardship, data owners own the data and data stewards manage a specific data subject area of their expertise. The customer data steward is different from the product data steward. Depending on the organization, the product of data is owned by product stewards.
In an organization, risk management is a part of corporate governance. A data governance council can drive data governance policies and should be responsible for decisions regarding strategy and program delivery. This means that IT security governance can affect the ownership of system and application security policies. It can also impact data access and protection policy implementation.
Figure 6-4 shows the data governance framework by subject area and demonstrates how each data steward is aligned with expertise of the subject area.
Figure 6-4. Data governance by subject area
Because the business department knows about the respective content and meaning of data more than anyone else, the data governance council involves data stewards from business. As the business domains can be further divided into subdomains (for example, the finance domain can be divided into collections, vendors, supplier domains, etc.), it is natural for individuals to gain expertise in their respective domains. One of the data stewards may be aligned into one of multiple domains.
The effectiveness of this stewardship model depends on the complexity of the data, subject areas, industry, and size of the organization. Generally, this stewardship model works best for medium- and large-sized companies where multiple departments share the same data.
Some of the benefits of the stewardship model by subject area are as follows:
• Stewards from business and IT are clear about their respective responsibilities.
• It is easy to implement and pitch stewardship and ownership responsibilities in this framework.
• Knowledge about the systems and business rules about the respective subject areas increases incrementally.The following are the challenges of stewardship by subject area:
• Data stewardship efforts take manual effort in all business areas.One measures data stewardship improvements in terms of business benefits and quantifies these benefits in monetary terms. Quantifying data quality improvements is one of the ways to measure success,but linking business benefits—e.g., customer retention—with data quality improvement is another challenge.
• The effectiveness of this model of stewardship is tied to business initiative. Tried and tested long-term relationship building with each department’s subject area experts is the key to success.
• Depending on the systems, data domain, culture, and other factors in an organization, data stewardship can become a political landmine, as people can become resistant to change and hold off the knowledge in fear of ceding control.