How Data Stewardship Can Help Your Organization

Data stewardship is an essential component of any organization’s data management strategy. It is a critical part of ensuring that data is accurate, secure, and accessible. It involves managing and overseeing all aspects of the data life cycle, from creation, collection, preparation, and usage to data storage and deletion. Data stewardship holds significant importance for an organization as it leverages data as a valuable resource and asset to help achieve strategic goals and objectives. It contributes to enhancing the quality, reliability, and consistency of data throughout the organization. Furthermore, it assures compliance with data regulations, policies, and standards, safeguarding the data against unauthorized access, misuse, or loss. Lastly, data stewardship plays a vital role in fostering a data-driven culture, empowering data users and consumers, thereby enhancing the overall efficiency of the organization.

In this chapter...

Defining data stewardship

Data stewardship is the practice of managing and protecting data to ensure it is accurate, secure, and accessible. It involves the development of policies and procedures to ensure data is properly managed and used in accordance with legal and ethical standards.

According to the Data Management Association (DAMA) (www.dama.org), one of the goals of data stewardship is that employees can have a mutual data conversation and make decisions without the need for someone to show them the path. The data governance committee in an organization can focus more on education and communication to spread data culture and knowledge among employees to have consensus and fruitful conversations about their data. Later on, we will also use the guidelines from the Enterprise Data Management (EDM) Council (www.edmcouncil.org) to illustrate the best practices of data stewardship and governance.

Let’s drill down to the key pillars of data stewardship and the key activities...

Using business cases for storytelling and value realization

In Chapter 1, we learned how the business strategy should drive the data strategy, which is the lighthouse for your data stewardship program. How exactly are business strategy, data strategy, and use cases relevant to the data value realization?

Data value realization is one of the key business objectives of the data stewardship program.

It is the process of extracting tangible benefits from data, and it is closely linked to business strategy, data strategy, and use cases. These elements are interrelated and shape how an organization uses its data to achieve its strategic objectives:

Figure 2.2 – Key building blocks for your data strategy, tactics, and operations

The business strategy outlines the overall goals and direction of the organization. It serves as a roadmap for what the organization wants to achieve and how it plans to do it. The data strategy, on the other hand, is a subset...

Creating a competitive edge with data stewardship

Data stewardship is not only a responsibility, but also an opportunity.

Data stewardship is also not just about data operation; it can be the competitive edge for an organization. Data stewardship is not a one-off project but a continuous process that requires constant adaptation and improvement. To maintain your competitive edge, you need to keep up with the changing data landscape, such as new data sources, technologies, regulations, and standards. You also need to foster a data-driven culture in your organization, where data stewards are empowered and supported by senior management and other stakeholders. By enabling these areas, your organization can stay ahead of the curve:

• Operation excellence

  This is about fostering a culture of continuous improvement across all aspects of the business while employees are empowered to make a change. Operation excellence is important to achieve a competitive advantage, optimize resource...

Summary

Data stewardship is crucial for organizations to ensure accurate, secure, and accessible data. It involves developing policies and procedures to manage data in accordance with legal and ethical standards. The key pillars of data stewardship include discovering, describing, managing, and democratizing data. Data stewardship requires both a data mindset and a data skillset to support both cultural and technical change for the organization.

Building a data stewardship program involves establishing a data governance strategy, developing policies and procedures, and implementing data governance tools. The role of a data steward includes developing and implementing data governance policies, monitoring data quality, ensuring data privacy and security, creating and maintaining data dictionaries, and resolving data-related issues. Measurable KPIs for data stewardship programs include data compliance, data quality, data issue resolution, and growth in data monetization. Business cases...