Although the job role requires a wide breadth of knowledge, it doesn’t necessarily require hands-on technical knowledge. The role of a data steward may or may not be a technical one, but it is a critical piece of the business process. The roles of a data steward can be far-reaching or narrow in scope. The organization needs to define what the role looks like, with some vital elements of a data steward to prioritize. Without data stewardship, you may have zero return on your investment. If the consumers cannot trust the data, what do you have left? Nothing but a large mess of useless data, which no organization wants after such a considerable investment of time, money, and effort in generating the critical data. Ensuring proper data stewardship helps promote confidence to consumers that the quality of the data is accurate and reliable. This trust allows organizations to use data to ensure sound business decisions, both operational and strategic. Data must be reliable in either case. Performing proper data stewardship instills a level of trust across all levels of any organization. In the event of a data breach or external attack, classifications let you more easily identify an appropriate response based on what type of data was exposed. Data stewards work with teams to ensure these rules are followed and implement processes to manage data. One often overlooked use for data governance is data classification, which allows you to classify data, most commonly by sensitivity or regulation. The data management policies help ensure protection from abuse, damage, theft, or other adverse events. The data governance group’s primary responsibility is to define and establish data management policies at an organizational level. Participants usually include business owners, technologists, and data representatives (including stewards). Some organizations have a dedicated, broad data governance group, whereas others may outsource the work to individual business units for better business domain knowledge. Data governance encompasses several different vital decision-makers. The data steward role typically lives within the business team and works with the technology team to ensure the organization’s data management and security.Īs mentioned, the data steward role falls under the overarching umbrella of data governance. Merriam Webster defines stewardship as “the conducting, supervising, or managing of something.”Ĭombining these explanations to simplify the definition of data stewardship can help you understand the data steward’s important role in the supervision and management of data and data governance. The data landscape contains the business data generated by applications or external sources. One of the challenges of managing data in organizations is system and database administrators (DBAs) typically lack a broader understanding of the data itself, which is important to managing data governance.ĭata governance is the process of ensuring critical business data, such as customer lists, invoices, etc., are defined consistently. Let’s talk about what data stewardship is and what it means to be a steward of the data. While the evolution of these data-related positions will continue, one aspect remains constant: each position plays some role in data stewardship, and we are all data stewards in one way or another. Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to watch the landscape of data positions evolve into various functions, such as data scientist, data architect, data analyst, business intelligence analyst, machine learning engineer-and the list continues. This realization led me into the world of databases and SQL Server. Regardless of which industry someone worked in-financial, medical, governmental, transportation, or retail-someone would have to work with and maintain business data, or the business would fail. Many years ago, in my earliest IT jobs in Omaha, Nebraska, I realized the field of data was going to continue to evolve and, as such, there would always be a need for people who worked with and understood data.
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