In today’s world, organizations process mountains’ worth of data daily for the betterment of their business functions. Data is useful for many tasks that can help a business succeed, and they all revolve around improving decision-making.
However, since the volume of incoming data is often significant, businesses frequently need help using their data in a reliable, systematic, and secure manner.
After all, data management can quickly become difficult to wrangle, especially when working at full capacity with a healthy sales funnel system. This is where the requirement for data governance and data stewardship plays a role in assisting organizations in enhancing the data’s accuracy and quality inside their data warehouses.
To cover how data stewardship can help improve an organization’s ability to manage data assets, this article covers the following topics:
What is Data Stewardship?
Data stewardship refers to the management of an organization’s data assets. This system embodies the operations responsible for ensuring that all data assets are trustworthy, usable, secure, and accessible.
It entails monitoring and supervising every part of the data lifecycle, from the data generation to its acquisition, processing, and consumption, as well as its storing, archiving, and deleting. The responsibility of data stewardship is to supply clients with high-quality data that you can retrieve easily and consistently.
Data Stewardship vs Data Governance
The difference between data governance and data stewardship is that the overarching concept of data governance contains the subset of responsibilities known as data stewardship. But although data governance provides high-level regulations for securing the data from loss, alteration, theft, or exploitation, data stewardship focuses on guaranteeing such policies are enforced.
Essentially, data stewardship controls tactical execution and coordination, whereas data governance focuses on high-level guidelines and procedures.
What is Data Governance and Stewardship?
Data stewardship must adhere to the data governance principles to guarantee that the business data collected is of high security, quality, and consistency across all instances. It includes the following:
- Complete awareness of all of the information obtained by the company.
- Providing for the accessibility, usage, security, and reliability of the data.
- Having a clear understanding of where the data is located.
- Ensuring that the data remain accurate while also remaining transparent.
- Putting in place guidelines and restrictions for the utilization of data.
- Providing the organization with the ability to use business data to achieve a competitive edge.
- Supporting the utilization of trustworthy information.
Learn about Agile Data Governance with Satori
Who is a Data Steward?
The individuals who are accountable for the management of data are referred to as data stewards. A data steward is a formal position given to specific individuals. Others take on the position’s responsibility in conjunction with their normal employment. In either case, the position is essential because data stewards serve as data communicators between the data team and the user community, with the end objective of providing users with reliable data to empower themselves.
A data steward acts as a bridge between an organization’s IT department and its business side and is responsible for carrying out the data consumption and security standards that have been set through corporate data governance projects.
Data Steward Roles and Responsibilities
The role calls for a diverse array of technical and corporation-oriented talents, such as data modeling and programming, as well as expertise in data warehousing and collection principles and business functions, among other things. In addition, data stewards are valued highly for their ability to communicate well and collaborate effectively.
A data steward is responsible for managing and coordinating all aspects of a data set that affect the data’s quality and integrity. This task is especially crucial when working with mission-critical or confidential client data that you must safeguard from getting into the wrong hands.
In addition, data stewards protect the data from threats to regulatory compliance and credibility and are the primary beneficiaries of the data, strategically using it to their benefit. Data stewards make it their top priority to educate consumers so that they can drive the most value out of data and enhance their organization’s decisions.
Importance of Data Stewardship
As the value of data as capital continues to climb exponentially, businesses in every sector are experiencing a significant uptick in the need for data stewards.
Consumers who do not trust the way organizations collect and use data feel uncomfortable providing it to organizations. This can be detrimental to an organization that needs data to make informed decisions. Moreover, data of inferior or inconsistent quality can drive enterprises to an erroneous strategic approach, severely affecting a company’s bottom line in the worst-case circumstances. Data stewards are responsible for preventing this from taking place.
Data stewards guarantee high levels of data reliability, authenticity, accessibility, integrity, and data confidentiality by constructing consistent data interpretations, sustaining corporate and technical regulations, evaluating and monitoring the validity of the data, and auditing and monitoring the accuracy of the data.
3 Data Stewardship Best Practices
The following is a list of three data stewardship best practices.
1. Data Stewards Are Key Members of the Data Team
For an organization’s data management function to be successful, its data stewards must be regular participants in the data team. They also need to receive frequent interactions, briefings, and opportunities from contributing to policy and procedure development.
2. Develop a Data-Driven Business Data Environment
Users have the potential to be primary drivers of a data-driven workplace, which can result in a competitive advantage if they are encouraged to incorporate data into every debate and decision.
3. Establish a Data Stewardship Task Force
Since data stewards are often located in different parts of the organization, they require a method by which they can connect, interact with one another, and work collaboratively with the data team. Putting together a data stewardship task force is one approach that might take you in this direction.
Conclusion
The most crucial stage in becoming data-driven is ensuring that the data is available, usable, secure, and trustworthy. All of those qualities are covered with data stewardship in place. Satori, the Data Security Platform can help you create a data stewardship program that works for your organization.
To learn more:
