Data stewardship is the practice of ensuring an organizations data is accessible, trustworthy, usable, and secure. It involves the management and oversight of an organizations data assets to provide business users with high-quality data that is easily accessible in a consistent manner. Data stewards are responsible for ensuring the quality and fitness for purpose of an organizations data assets, including the metadata for those data assets. They have a specialist role that utilizes an organizations data governance processes, policies, guidelines, and responsibilities for administering an organizations entire data in compliance with policy and/or regulatory obligations.
Data stewardship encompasses every aspect of the data lifecycle, including creating, preparing, using, storing, archiving, and deleting data, in accordance with an organizations established data governance principles for promoting data quality and integrity. Data stewards are accountable for the management of all data within and used by the enterprise and ensuring that the data-related rules as established by the data governance program are followed.
Data stewardship responsibilities include:
- Ensuring that each assigned data element has clear and unambiguous data element definition
- Managing critical data, both reference and transactional, created or used by one business function
- Serving as a liaison between the organizations data users and technical teams, helping to bridge the gap between business needs and technical requirements
- Helping to create and implement processes and procedures for data collection, storage, use, and security
- Identifying ways to use data to drive enterprise objectives
- Ensuring data is deemed fit for purpose by developing data quality rules and regularly auditing data
- Participating in the development of data policies including data retention, data privacy, data use, and data regulations
- Reviewing data sharing requests and approving or rejecting them
- Defining and reviewing code values/code lists and identifying sources of master data
- Attending stewardship group meetings and participating in working groups as needed
- Reviewing reports and visualization to ensure they are performing as expected and meeting the needs of the business ensuring the data is viewed as trusted
Data stewardship is important because it helps organizations ensure that their data is accessible, usable, safe, and trusted. It also helps organizations guard against the regulatory and reputational risks that come with owning data. The benefits of data stewardship inc...
