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More than ever, organizations rely on data stewardship for accurate, accessible, and well-managed data to drive innovation, improve decision-making, and maintain a competitive edge. Data stewardship is essential for maintaining the quality, accessibility, and usability of data within an organization.

Whether you’re navigating the complexities of data governance or seeking to optimize your data strategy, understanding data stewardship is key to harnessing the power of data for business success.

This blog post discusses a data steward's core principles and responsibilities, emphasizing their critical role in preserving data integrity and enabling data-driven decision-making.

Principles of data stewardship

Data stewardship is the collection of practices that ensure an organization’s data is accessible, usable, safe, and trusted. Data stewardship involves taking care of data, including knowing where it is, ensuring it is trustworthy, safeguarding data lineage, enforcing the rules about how data can be used, and promoting its value.

Data stewardship can be implemented in every phase of the data life cycle, including:

  • Data creation
  • Data processing
  • Data storage
  • Data usage
  • Data archiving
  • and data destruction

By combining business acumen with technical skills, data stewardship ensures all departments have access to reliable data daily. Therefore, data stewards oversee specific activities such as data collection, cataloging, and inventorying that enable users to find and extract value from data sets.

Responsibilities of data stewardship

The following are the top four most pressing responsibilities for an employee tasked with data stewardship:

Offering a universal business glossary

An essential component of data stewardship is ensuring that knowledge is accessible to all stakeholders. One effective way to achieve this is by providing a universal business glossary: A centralized data collection of widely used data terms and definitions within the organization.

By making the business glossary available to everyone in the organization, data stewards promote a shared understanding of terminology across the company. This reduces confusion and enhances communication between teams and departments. Additionally, the business glossary is a reliable reference for data-related discussions, ensuring consistent use of terms and fostering alignment across all stakeholders.

DataGalaxy's Business Glossary

Help users speak a common language & share critical insights

DataGalaxy’s Business Glossary software bridges the gap between business, IT, and technical teams to help users speak the same language, share critical insights, and drive informed decision-making practices based on reliable datasets.

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Data stewardship ensures consistent and correct data glossary definitions, updates terms to reflect evolving business needs, and fosters cross-department collaboration to create a shared language. It promotes the glossary's use, embeds it into governance processes, and resolves conflicts over terminology, ensuring it remains a trusted resource.

Data stewardship transforms the glossary into a dynamic tool that enhances communication, decision-making, and organizational alignment by reducing ambiguity, improving data quality, and supporting scalability.

Recognizing & reconciling different perspectives

Data stewardship is vital for managing varying interpretations of data definitions across departments. For instance, a term like “Customer” might mean different things to different teams, creating inconsistencies. Data stewardship plays a key role in reconciling these differences to promote accuracy and consistency in data management.

Through active stakeholder engagement, data stewardship aligns definitions by fostering collaboration, communication, and understanding across the organization. It bridges gaps in perspectives and ensures a unified approach to data. Additionally, data stewardship facilitates discussions to resolve conflicts or disagreements about data definitions, ensuring consensus and a shared framework for effective data governance.

Ensuring data accessibility

A key objective of data stewardship is to ensure data accessibility. Data stewards strive to make data readily available to authorized users while maintaining strict security and privacy standards. They work closely with IT teams to develop data access policies, manage user permissions, and implement governance frameworks that safeguard sensitive information.

Additionally, data stewardship emphasizes maintaining data quality and integrity by ensuring consistency across systems and addressing obstacles to accessibility. It aims to break down data silos and enable seamless integration, empowering various departments and teams to access and analyze the data critical to their operations efficiently.

Perspective recognition for data understanding

Beyond ensuring accessibility, data stewardship emphasizes the importance of context and perspective in understanding data. It acknowledges that stakeholders may have diverse interpretations and unique requirements for data analysis. Data stewards gather valuable insights into these differing perspectives and needs by collaborating with various teams and departments.

This understanding enables data stewards to present data insights and reports in ways that resonate with each audience. They act as intermediaries, translating technical concepts into actionable, business-relevant information, ensuring that stakeholders can easily grasp and utilize the data for informed decision-making.

Data stewardship real-world examples

Data stewardship isn’t just a theoretical concept – it has real-world applications and use cases across various industries. Here are a few examples:

Healthcare

Data stewardship ensures patient records are accurate, up-to-date, and securely stored. Data stewards then implement privacy safeguards to protect sensitive medical data and provide patients with secure access to their health information.

Financial services

Data stewardship maintains the accuracy of customer account information and transaction histories. Data stewards implement robust security measures to protect financial data and provide customers with tools for financial insights.

Retail and e-commerce

Data stewards manage customer profiles and purchase history data. Data stewardship helps ensure product information is consistent across systems and safeguards customer payment information.

Education

Data stewards manage student records, academic performance data, and institutional research information. They ensure data privacy compliance and facilitate data-driven decision-making in educational policy and practice.

Conclusion

Data stewardship empowers organizations to make informed decisions and stay competitive in a fast-paced digital landscape by ensuring data is accurate, accessible, and secure.

Additionally, data stewards help ensure effective data governance through their data stewardship, from maintaining data quality and fostering a shared understanding through business glossaries to reconciling diverse perspectives and addressing real-world challenges.

Organizations can unlock the full potential of their data by embracing the principles and practices of data stewardship. This can help transform it into a powerful asset that drives innovation, collaboration, and long-term success.

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