Model 3: Data Steward by Business Process – Data Democratization, Governance, and Security

Model 3: Data Steward by Business Process

Data stewardship by business process means data stewardship is assigned to an individual business process. This stewardship model is very effective for companies that already have a high level of mature processes and understanding about data at the enterprise level.

Data stewardship responsibility is assigned by specific business processes. A single business process consists of multiple data domains, applications, and systems. One or several data stewards may be assigned to each business process based on the complexity, scope, and size of the domain area. For instance, tech companies with corporate software products e.g., sales process (from quote to cash business process) can have one business data steward assigned to this process and multiple IT data stewards assigned. There would be primary and secondary stewards assigned to subject matter experts (SMEs).

Benefits of stewardship by business process include the following:

•    It is easy to manage the predefined business processes as a natural extension of process definitions.

•    Measurement of business benefit, data quality, and data availability in terms of business process is straightforward and reliable.

•    It is easy to justify the cost to expand the stewards for processes. This is an efficient and effective way to extend stewardship across organizations.

The risks of stewardship by business process include the following:

•    A data ownership model becomes difficult to assign to multiple process stewards as they use the same tables, elements, and domains. Implementation of an enterprise-wide data governance program is important to manage this situation.

•    As the business grows, the size and complexity of data and processes increases. The several data stewards assigned to the same process could cause confusion.