The
Data Steward – An Enterprise Resource
Shepherding enterprise data across
the data supply chain
Baseline defines a data steward as a specialist who understands
and tracks the lineage, meaning, relevance, and usage of
a data domain or subject area across its business lifecycle.
Baseline’s Data Stewardship Blueprint helps you accomplish
two things:
- First, it delivers an organizational
framework, key roles, and responsibility description for
the data steward job function in your company.
- Second, it defines the “catalog
of services” that positions the data steward as
a value-added enterprise resource for his or her data
domain or subject area. This “catalog of services”
includes a set of practices, processes, policies, and
communications for one or more data stewards in your organization.
Data Stewardship Blueprint can be used by IT, business,
and HR alike to gain clarity around the role and ensure
its continued success. Moreover, Baseline delivers ancillary
recommendations, such as the need to set up a data quality
team or data governance framework, as part of the Data Stewardship
Blueprint engagement.
» Your Challenges
» The Problem
» The Baseline Approach
» Your Value
» Why Baseline
Your
Challenges
- Describing the data stewardship role
- Selling the role based on solid business
drivers
- Empowering stewards with authority
and accountability
- Distinguishing between business and
IT data stewards
- Not underestimating the complexity,
scope, influence, or knowledge required
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The
Problem
Who owns the data?
The role of data steward is one of the most widely adopted
in business today. It’s also one of the most misunderstood.
Too many companies appoint a data steward, give her an automation
tool, and think the job is done.
In reality, Baseline finds that most companies severely
underestimate the skills and knowledge necessary for the
data steward role.
Data stewards are the authorities of corporate data. They
assume broad and diverse responsibilities: working with
data modelers and metadata administrators; defining data;
executing new data rules; monitoring ongoing data quality;
putting standards into place; aligning regulatory mandates
back to individual data elements; representing progress
to the data governance council. It’s no wonder that
many companies struggle to clearly describe the role.
These are signals that it’s time for a data stewardship
blueprint at your company:
- Lines of business debate the definition
and usage of key data subject areas.
- Success of enterprise applications,
like CRM, is in doubt without unified data definitions,
agreed-upon sourcing, and quality standards.
- Departments duplicate efforts, resulting
in conflicting data models or metadata.
- A newly purchased data quality tool
mandates ownership and administration.
- IT projects are late or over budget
because no one “owned” the data problem.
- The role of “Business Analyst”
is a catch-all and lacks influence.
- Existing data stewards have lost authority
with business users or project managers.
- Management needs someone to execute
a data governance plan.
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The
Baseline Approach
Define business needs and expectations
before identifying stewards and their roles
Baseline takes a structured approach to examining your
current capabilities for data stewardship and how they align
to existing data management functions, governance frameworks,
and business processes. We define stewardship needs and
processes before considering organizational hierarchies
or individuals’ qualifications.
Often, this means gaining consensus on expectations before
prescribing the data steward role. Interviews with key individuals
in both the IT and business areas are critical in establishing
the data stewardship environment that will work best.
For instance, the Data Stewardship Blueprint often makes
room for more than one kind of data steward—a Business
Data Steward and an IT Data Steward—in environments
where the degree of system and process complexity is high.
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Your Value
Clear data accountability and
value-added service to business and IT project teams
You now have an answer—and a plan—to the pervasive
question, “Who owns the data?”
While the company will continue to own the data as a corporate
asset, accountability for managing that data, taking direction
from data governance bodies, and driving execution tactics
to clean, correct, reconcile, and deploy the data to the
business rests squarely on the shoulders of the data steward.
As the role matures, people across the organization come
to recognize the data steward as a value-added IT project
resource who reduces redundant work efforts and improves
project efficiency.
Designing the Information Center of
Excellence (ICE)
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Why Baseline
Taking data stewardship beyond
tools and tasks; empowering your stewards as internal management
consultants
Business intelligence and data quality vendors make data
stewardship sound easy—an afterthought to automation.
Baseline’s Data Stewardship Blueprint, on the other
hand, is a management consulting function.
We begin by evaluating the promise of data stewardship
from a business perspective. Then we develop an understanding
of the need for data stewardship, including specific project
or enterprise pain points that mandate the shepherding of
data across the data supply chain.
We use this knowledge—either before or after delivering
our recommendations—to “sell’ the concept
of data stewardship to managers who might not fully understand
the role or its boundaries.
With Data Steward Blueprint, you get a customer-specific
model—or a “blueprint”—that focuses
on opening and resolving “cases” where data
must be understood, tracked, managed, corrected, and deployed.
We construct Stewardship Excellence measures which you
can use to evaluate new policies and check data accuracy
across the data supply chain.
The Data Stewardship Blueprint communicates a solid definition
of data steward and ensures the role is embraced by the
corporation.
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