How Data Stewardship and Data Governance Fit Together

Companies are getting serious about managing the availability, usability, integrity, and security of the data in their enterprise systems, including improving data quality, understanding the meaning of the data, and leveraging the data for competitive advantage. Managing data requires accountability. The formal need for business units to take responsibility for the data they own and use, and to have resources in place to manage the data is known as Data Governance. Effective Data Governance ensures that the data is consistent and trustworthy and does not get misused.

Data Stewardship is the implementation of Data Governance within an organization. Data Stewards are responsible for ensuring that data policies and standards set by the Data Governance Committee are turned into practice. Stewardship can be formalized through job titles and descriptions, or it can be a less formal function driven by people trying to help an organization get value from its data. Data Stewardship is crucial to the success of Data Governance.

Data Related Challenges Faced by Organizations

There are many challenges businesses face when working with data including:

• Data does not explain itself. Someone must provide an interpretation of the data, including what it means, how to use it properly, and how to evaluate if the data is of good quality or not.
• Data is shared and used by many, for many different purposes. Who owns the data? Who makes decisions about it? Who is responsible when data goes “wrong”?
• Processes that use data depend on people upstream of the process to “get it right”. But who says, what “right” is? And, who determines when it goes “wrong”?
• Software Development Lifecycles require many handoffs between requirements, analysis, design, testing, deployment, and data usage. There are many places where the handoff can corrupt the data and endanger the data quality.
• Technical people tasked with implementation may not be familiar with the data’s meaning or how it is to be used.

All of these factors lead to poor understanding of the data and a perception of poor quality. Many organizations try to find answers to these questions by implementing failed strategies:

• Data Definitions: Sometimes the data definitions are written in haste by project staff and the definitions are not rationalized across the enterprise, leading to multiple definitions of the same term. Existing data definitions are often not kept up-to-date.
• Data Quality: The data quality rules are not always defined, and data quality is rarely measured even if the rules are defined.
• Documentation: Documentation containing the metadata is either missing or is not easily accessible. There is usually no search engine that allows interested users to find what they need.
• Creation and Usage Business Rules: There’s a lack of understanding about the conditions under which an entity (such as a Customer or a Product) can or should be created and how it should be used. This leads to incomplete or inaccurate information being collected about the entity, as well as data being used for purposes for which it was never intended. This may result in business decisions based on the data leading to suboptimal results.

Formal enterprise-wide Data Stewardship, as part of the Data Governance effort, is crucial in managing data and in offering solutions to the above challenges. Like physical assets within an organization, data needs to be inventoried, owned, used wisely, and understood. Even though the need is the same as for physical assets, it requires different techniques.

Establishing data ownership requires understanding how the data is collected, who uses it, and who is best responsible for the content and the quality of the data elements. It is also key to understand for what purpose the data was created, and whether it’s suitable for use in new situations as they arise.

Data governance is all about how people work together to make decisions and recommendations about data. Data Stewards are the subject matter experts and represent those people and are the most knowledgeable about the data. The key to a successful Data Governance program is to set up and staff the organization and socialize the roles and responsibilities for the Data Governance participants, and one of the most critical roles in that structure is of Data Stewards. Data Stewards must work together to determine ownership, meaning, and quality requirements for their data.