Data Ownership and Data Stewardship: Understanding the Difference
As data becomes increasingly critical for organizations, it’s essential to clearly define roles and responsibilities related to data management. Two key concepts in this realm are data ownership and data stewardship. While sometimes used interchangeably, they represent distinct and collaborative responsibilities.
What is Data Ownership?
Data ownership refers to the rights and control over an organization’s data by a specific person or group. The data owner makes strategic decisions such as:
- How and why data can be used
- Who is allowed to access the data
- Policies around data privacy and security
- Acceptable use cases and processes
- Data retention periods
- Sharing data internally or with external parties
Data owners hold the authority over data assets in an organization. They establish the governance framework and accountability for data management.
What is Data Stewardship?
Data stewardship focuses on the day-to-day execution of data-related tasks and processes that ensure data quality, security, and usability. Data stewards handle operational responsibilities like:
- Maintaining data accuracy and consistency
- Performing data cleansing and enrichment
- Ensuring proper data organization and metadata
- Protecting data through security practices
- Managing data backups and restores
- Provisioning data access based on policies
- Identifying and resolving data issues
- Optimizing data systems and architecture
Data stewards work to maintain and improve an organization’s data health, integrity and accessibility on an ongoing basis.
Key Differences
While an individual or entity can play both owner and steward roles, the responsibilities differ:
- Data owners make strategic decisions and hold authority
- Data stewards focus on operational implementation and optimization
Organizations need data ownership to establish accountability. But they also require data stewards to perform crucial data management duties.
Here is a table that summarizes the key differences between data ownership and data stewardship:
Real-World Examples
In a hospital, the legal team owns patient medical records data. They control privacy, third-party sharing, and audit policies. But IT handles stewardship like data quality, backups, security, and provisioning access.
For a retailer’s customer data, marketing owns data usage, retention rules, and external sharing decisions. But analysts steward the data through processing, validation, integration, building reports, and tools.
Banks must prove ownership of financial transaction data to comply with regulations. Their data governance office stewards areas like integrity, lineage, security, and issue remediation.
The Importance of Collaboration
Clearly delineating data ownership and stewardship roles enhance an organization’s data management maturity:
- It aligns decision-making authority with technical expertise
- It preventsadata responsibility gaps or overlaps
- It harmonizes an organization’s strategic data direction with tactical execution
Effective data ownership provides a vision, while proficient data stewardship enables trustworthy analytics and insights. Both collaborative roles are essential for becoming a truly data-driven enterprise.
