Data Stewards
An excerpt from Designing Data Governance from the Ground Up by Lauren Maffeo
All lines of business that produce and/or manage unique data should have designated data stewards. Sales, marketing, and customer success are three teams that manage data that keeps your business running. You should thus have at least one senior member of each team serving as a data steward who can own the data in their respective business domains.
Your business might need more or fewer stewards than this list, which is fine; adapt your stewards to your own business needs and restrictions. The key takeaway is that any stewardship role should align with at least one aspect of the seven-part data framework. With that in mind, here’s a non- exhaustive list of roles that data stewards can serve:
Council Chair Data Steward
Your data stewardship council chair plays its key leadership role. The chair leads all meetings with stewards and represents the data governance council at meetings with folks throughout the business. The council chair approves requests to start projects or buy new data tools, leads meetings with the data governance council about its direction, and owns the data governance strategy. At a high level, they perform the following tasks:
• Build and implement a strategic data management plan for data governance council members to execute.
• Oversee all projects and initiatives related to organizational data.
• Assign responsibilities to data stewards for respective technical and business roles.
• Share communication about changes to data initiatives.
• Represent the data governance council at C-suite and cross-departmental meetings.
• Explain the organization’s response to security breaches.
• Define what “quality data” means in your organization, including which data sources to use and avoid.
Security Data Steward
Security data stewards set data usage and security policies in partnership with the data governance council chair and C-suite. Security data stewards liaise between the business and technical sides of your organization to set and share security updates throughout the broader business.
Security stewards perform the following tasks:
• Oversee all security requirements to safeguard data.
• Assign appropriate security classifications to all company data based on sensitivity.
• Collect all security-related data artifacts for legacy and new projects.
• Create security artifacts as needed.
• Assess current security requirements, and adherence to these requirements.
• Make security findings available on request.
• Define data lockup requirements.
• Conduct gap and impact analyses of all new security requirements.
• Compare security requirements against current and proposed data environments.
• Audit and approve all proposed production changes against security risks.
Your security data steward should review any new project or tool that your council approves. They’ll assess each request against the organization’s security standards, offering guidance early to avoid technical debt.
Ethics and Transparency Data Steward
This steward ensures your data governance policies meet the clear, defensible, and documented standards discussed for data use in Transparency and Ethics, on page ?. Your ethics and transparency data steward works directly with the data team to help data analysts, scientists, architects, and engineers consider how their work might impact customers in unintended ways.
The ethics and transparency data steward might do hands-on work with data if they have a data science or engineering background, but this isn’t required to drive change in the role. Your ethics and transparency data steward will need to consider a broad range of digital ethics risks per data project, then share those risks with the data governance council. An ethics and transparency data steward should perform these tasks:
• Write compliance standards for how your organization stores, shares, collects, and protects data.
• Map possible ethics risks per data project back to your organization’s business and data mission statements.
• Document decisions for how to manage data, including rationale for how these decisions serve the business and customers alike. (This is especially important, as customer well-being often stands at odds with what’s “best” for the business.)
• Train employees across the organization to practice data ethics, from C-suite leaders to individual contributors.
• Ensure that your organization’s data ethics practice meets broader legal and legislative compliance standards.
• Confirm that all technology your business buys and uses meets your organization’s own compliance standards.
Many ethics and transparency stewards have backgrounds in law and/or compliance, which helps them assess risk and predict which data use might breach civil rights.
Documentation Data Steward
Your documentation data steward is your council’s resident writer. They manage the council’s documentation repository, which stores everything from council meeting notes to business requirements for user acceptance testing per project. Within this stewardship role, they perform these tasks:
• Write consistent data definitions.
• Train colleagues across the organization on best practices to document data-based work.
• Store this documentation in the appropriate area(s).
• Write, edit, and manage documentation for all data-based decisions and initiatives.
• Manage artifacts like data architecture diagrams, data model(s), and data dictionaries.
• Edit data artifacts as needed in partnership with technical stewards.
• Organize all high-level data assets, such as data dictionaries and metadata catalogs.
This data steward might not write all the documentation themselves; part of a data governance council’s value is having folks across the business own data-specific work so it doesn’t fall to one person. In cases where they don’t write documentation themselves, the documentation data steward still owns the repository and stores documentation appropriately.
Compliance Data Steward
Compliance data stewards often bring legal backgrounds to their data governance work. This steward tracks regulatory changes involving data and ensures data usage meets those changes. They work closely with all roles on the data stewardship council, from writing compliance standards for the documentation data steward to reviewing data transparency requirements with your ethics data steward. The compliance data steward performs these tasks:
• Reviews regulatory frameworks for data across markets where your business serves users.
• Interprets diverse laws to confirm data-specific rights for businesses and consumers.
• Ensures that your business follows essential laws for data management per project and vendor selection.
• Communicates with data stewards and the data team to ensure that everyone considers compliance pre-resource allocation.
• Reviews models during the data use life cycle to ensure that the data team follows data quality standards before, during, and after production.
If some of these titles sound familiar, it’s because key stewardship roles align with the data governance framework you explored in “Find Your Data Governance Framework.” When building your own data stewardship team, make sure you have alignment between stewardship roles and the respective parts of your data framework. Assigning colleagues to co-own your framework will help bring it to life.
Depending on your organization’s size, you might not have enough stewards to fill roles that address all aspects of the framework. In those cases, look for opportunities where one steward has the expertise to own two parts of the framework. For instance, there’s a lot of natural overlap between the ethics and transparency data steward and the compliance data steward. If you have an attorney on staff to serve as the compliance steward, ethics and transparency can fall to them as well.
When trying to fill roles per part of the framework, consider who’s already doing this work. A data steward who leads customer success could be the ideal fit for your education and training data steward role. This empowers them to help all colleagues in your organization learn what data governance is, why it’s relevant to everyone’s roles, and how to ask data stewards for help. Customer success teams spend their days speaking to clients, triaging questions, and showing diverse people how to use your products. Education and training is already a key aspect of their work. This aptitude puts them in a natural spot to steward education and training for data governance.
Likewise, a marketing leader can serve as your collaboration and culture data steward. Marketers explore, create, and lead opportunities to find the right audience for your products. The best marketers are natural storytellers who can seamlessly share how their products meet your needs. You will need that storytelling prowess to share why data governance is a team sport, and guide your company culture through the change required to make it work long-term.
You will know your data stewardship council is on the right track when each aspect of the seven-part framework is accounted for. But if you’re still in the early stages, you might wonder how to hire data stewards at all. The great news is that you don’t have to.
We hope you enjoyed this excerpt. If you’d like to continue reading Designing Data Governance from the Ground Up by Lauren Maffeo, you can purchase the book directly from The Pragmatic Bookshelf:
