DNA of a Data Stewardship Dream Team
In my last article, I talked about why Data Stewardship should be the 'heartbeat' of your Data Governance capability.
But the impact of Data Stewardship goes far beyond Data Governance.
For example, many organizations realize that a Data Stewardship strategy is critical to the overall success of a Data-Driven culture.
What's more, your Data Stewardship team will help actualize the adoption and operationalization of your Data Governance vision around the Enterprise Data Asset - thereby realizing your Organization's Strategic Goals and Objectives.
In other words, for success to be realized – your Data Stewardship team must be carefully sourced, empowered, equipped and positioned as the conduit for the organization's cultural data transformation.
Organizations must be intentional in their hiring and sourcing of the skilled data advocates and champions that will help drive and accelerate the communitization of key Data Governance activities.
Such activities typically would include the following:
Ownership & Data community setup
Metadata Management & Classification
Data Sourcing
Data Lineage Management
Data Quality Definitions & Management
Issue Management & Remediation
Change Control Management
Once these activities are activated & communitized with defined roles & responsibilities by your Stewardship teams, you can begin to realize Strategic Goals such as:
Better Decision-Making
Regulatory Compliance
Transparency
Customer Loyalty
Risk Management
Operational Efficiency
Revenue Growth and Analytics
Due to these strategic benefits, you must look out for certain traits in the selection of right people into your Stewardship roles and responsibilities in the team formation.
Stewardship Setup Fundamentals
The alignment of your stewardship team to the Data Governance Framework must be agreed at the outset. This alignment is key to how you position the Stewardship office within your Data Governance initiative.
Depending on your organization size and data maturity level at the time of Data Governance adoption, your Data Stewardship Model will adopt one of the following structures:
Centralized (at the enterprise level)
Distributed (localized)
Federated (centralized with local adoption)
Irrespective of the chosen Stewardship Model of adoption chosen by your organization, the people part remains the same, and the traits to look for when appointing people into Stewardship roles should be broadly the same.
First, we must highlight that there are multiple embedded roles and different actors that must be explicitly called out as part of the Stewardship team besides 'Data Stewards'.
In short, Every Data Citizen is a Data Steward in a broader sense.
Your mantra should be that 'Stewardship of the enterprise data is everyone's business'.
Appointed leaders into Stewardship roles must be intentional in reproducing themselves in their local communities and across the organization over time.
The desired cultural transformation should be to make every data citizen (Producers and Consumers of data) accountable for the data they engage with at every point in time.
What roles and traits should you look for in a Data Steward?
Click to enlarge the diagram
Data Stewardship Lead/Manager: It is highly recommended to have a Stewardship Lead for every Data Governance initiative to help champion stewardship at the enterprise level or centralized level.
This Leader is the champion of the stewardship council. A vital role that must be carefully sourced (either locally or externally).
Because Stewardship is an evolving role, you may be better off finding good fit personalities of those currently acting as 'change agents' inside your organization. This leader must be intimate with the organization's data pains.
The Data Stewardship Lead champions and guides the overall effort at the enterprise level.
They work with appointed local stewards in different data communities. This individual must be assertive, an excellent communicator and a well-respected individual in the organization - a leader, a collaborator, a broker and a driver who knows how to get things done.
They must have influence and authority in the organization. They know how to woo and draw in like-minded Data evangelists and allies within each data community.
They should have a broad understanding of the business and the players within each data community so they can help identify and build communities around data domains in a strategic way.
The leader must have a good understanding of the organization's business model, processes, people and technology at a high level.
They need to lead the Stewardship team as the main conduit of execution for the successful governance of data in their organization.
They will become a crucial member of the Data Governance and Stewardship Council, or may even become the chair of the Data Governance Council.
Community Business Owner: Every Data Community needs a Business Owner (especially in large organizations with competing demands and varying business models).
The Community Business Owner must be a senior executive that understands the ROI that will be realized from Data Governance as they will become the 'chief stewardship ally' in each data community.
He or she must be a key stakeholder and a direct beneficiary of the overall success of the governance adoption - the optimal and timely delivery of the governance initiative is at the heart of this role.
This role helps the Stewardship Lead and Data Governance Officer to gain momentum by rightfully engaging the appropriate resources to drive governance activities in their 'constituency'.
And of course, they are also an essential member of your Data Governance Council.
Local Data Steward: Depending on the size and setup of your organization, local Data Stewards may typically be defined by one or more of the following criteria:
Domain
Function
System
These individuals must have specialized skills and insights that relate to their specific Domain, Function or System of expertise.
Their execution is focused locally on their domain or data community.
They are the authoritative voice of their constituency, so must possess a collaborative spirit that leads them naturally to work hand-in-hand with the Enterprise Stewardship Lead and their local leaders and SMEs.
Local Stewards should ideally possess similar traits as the Stewardship Lead. Their focus and scope of operation is narrow as they're champions and drivers of governance activities in their data communities.
It's also worth noting that Local Stewards are not necessarily accountable for the data in their domain, even though they're responsible for compliance of their data to Data Governance Standards and Policies.
They must lead and facilitate the POD /working group of SMEs and Data Owners in their constituency to actualize governance around their data-set.
Data Owners: This is a crucial role in your Data Stewardship setup. Several Data Owners will often be identified for different Data Communities and Domains within your organization.
Data Owners cannot be hired, they're appointed roles from within your organization.
You must identify, engage and formalize individuals who are already playing this role, perhaps in an informal way, in your existing data communities.
They must understand this is not an extension to the role they're currently playing, but simply a recognition and empowerment through the appropriate tools and training for the role they're already performing.
They will be natural data advocates with a keen eye for detail.
They must understand the data journey and be skilled to provide guardrails for data entry and usage in the form of quality rules and controls of data in their domain.
They must work closely with Local Data Stewards to provide the necessary knowledge base and SME knowledge of their Data.
Process Owners: Another key role in Data Stewardship. These individuals will share similar traits as Data Owners.
Indeed, the same individuals appointed as Data Owners may often serve as Process Owners. Depending on the complexity of the data architecture and journey of the data through its lifecycle in an organization, there may be a need to call this out as a separate role.
In situations where a lot of additional inputs and transformations take place along your data lineage, a Process Owner might serve as the best fit to own variables introduced to the data along its journey.
Nonetheless, one significant difference between the two roles is that the data process owner contributes to the data processes and calculations for aggregation and reporting.
Data Custodian/Platform Owners: These are the technology enablers around data. This role sits within IT and individuals appointed to this position must have a deep understanding of:
The architecture of the organization's data
The technology their data resides on
The structure and layout of their data
The interactions of the data in terms of tables and columns
Data Custodians and Platform Owners will understand the complex data inputs and outputs that flow in and out of systems as a result of their responsibilities for maintaining the underlying technology and data feeds in operation.
They will support the Steward and Owners to ensure enterprise defined data standards, procedures, quality rules are enforced and monitored throughout the systems architecture.
They implement defined rules and controls set by Data Owners, monitor the exceptions and drive resolution against data quality issues.
They execute resolutions based on the defined rules and control by data owners.
In Summary
If your organization is embarking on a Data Governance initiative, then you must ensure its leaders are thinking strategically about its 'Data Stewardship Dream Team' by ensuring they possess some the traits above.
Studies show that most Data Governance initiatives are failing due to a weakness in identifying the key players required to help drive execution and adoption.
Hence, we cannot overemphasize enough that the people foundation is vital for any Data Governance initiative to be successful.
The Data Governance foundation is simply 'People' – Champion data leaders and advocates.
You must build a team of Stewardship champions, empower them and equip them for success. They will accelerate your Data Governance initiative by building like-minded stewardship communities around themselves.
When you get this right, their energy will 'catch fire' and create the sustainable, Data-Driven cultural transformation, that every organization desires.
Next Steps
Want some help to build your own 'Data Governance Dream Team'?
If you are struggling to operationalize your Data Governance capability or just need some guidance on where to start, schedule a call with Lara Gureje to learn more:
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