Data stewards

A data steward is a role within an organization responsible for utilizing an organization's Data Governance processes to ensure fitness of data elements - both the content and metadata. Data stewards have a specialist role that incorporates processes, policies, guidelines and responsibilities for administering organizations' entire data in compliance with policy and/or regulatory obligations. A data steward may share some responsibilities with a data custodian.

The overall objective of a data steward is data quality, in regard to the key/critical data elements existing within a specific enterprise operating structure, of the elements in their respective domains. This includes capturing/documenting (meta)information for their elements (such as: definitions, related rules/governance, physical manifestation, related data models, etc. With most of these properties being specific to an attribute/concept relationship), identifying owners/custodians/various responsibilities, relations insight pertaining to attribute quality, aiding with project requirement data facilitation and documentation of capture rules.

Data stewards begin the stewarding process with the identification of the elements which they will steward, with the ultimate result being standards, and data entry. The steward works closely with business glossary standards analysts (for standards), with data architect/modelers (for standards), with DQ analysts (for controls) and with operations team members (good-quality data going in per business rules) while entering data.

Data stewardship roles are common when organizations attempt to exchange data precisely and consistently between computer systems and to reuse data-related resources.Master data management often makes references to the need for data stewardship for its implementation to succeed. Data stewardship must have precise purpose, fit for purpose or fitness.

A data steward ensures that each assigned data element:

Systematic data stewardship can foster fitness through:

Assignment of each data element to a person sometimes seems like an unimportant process. But many groups have found that users have greater trust and usage rates in systems where they can contact a person with questions on each data element.

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