What is the difference between a Data Owner and a Data Steward?

What is the difference between a Data Owner and a Data Steward?

What is the difference between a data steward and a data owner? This question comes up over and over again!

There are many different definitions associated with data management and data governance on the internet. Moreover, depending on the company, their definitions and responsibilities can vary significantly. To try and clarify the situation, we’ve written this article to shed light on these two profiles and establish a potential complementarity.

Above all, we firmly believe that there is no idyllic or standard framework. These definitions are specific to each company because of their organization, culture, and their “legacy”.

Data owners and data stewards: two roles with different maturities

The recent appointment of CDOs was largely driven by the digital transformations undertaken in recent years: mastering the data life cycle from its collection to its value creation. To try to achieve this, a simple – yet complex – objective has emerged: first and foremost, to know the company’s information assets, which are all too often siloed. 

Thus, the first step for many CDOs was to reference these assets. Their mission was to document them from a business perspective as well as the processes that have transformed them, and the technical resources to exploit them. 

This founding principle of data governance was also evoked by Christina Poirson, CDO of Société Générale during a roundtable discussion at Big Data Paris 2020. She explained the importance of knowing your data environment and the associated risks to ultimately create value. During her presentation, Christina Poirson developed the role of the Data Owner and the challenge of sharing data knowledge. Part of the business roles, they are responsible for defining their datasets as well as their uses and their quality level, without questioning the Data Owner:

“The data in our company belongs either to the customer or to the whole company, but not to a particular BU or department. We manage to create value from the moment the data is shared”.  

It is evident that the role of “Data Owner” has been present in organizations longer than the “Data Steward” has. They are stakeholders in the collection, accessibility and quality of datasets. We qualify a Data Owner as being the person in charge of the final data. For example, a marketing manager can undertake this role in the management of customer data. They will thus have the responsibility and duty to control its collection, protection and uses.

More recently, the democratization of data stewards has led to the creation of dedicated positions in organizations. Unlike a Data Owner and manager, the Data Steward is more widely involved in a challenge that has been regaining popularity for some time now: data governance.

In our articles, “Who are data stewards” and “The Data Steward’s multiple facets“, we go further into explaining about this profile, who are involved in the referencing and documenting phases of enterprise assets (we are talking about data of course!) to simplify their comprehension and use.

Data steward and data owners: two complementary roles?

In reality, companies do not always have the means to open new positions for Data Stewards. In an ideal organization, the complementarity of these profiles could tend towards :  

A data owner is responsible for the data within their perimeter in terms of its collection, protection and quality. The data steward would then be responsible for referencing and aggregating the information, definitions and any other business needs to simplify the discovery and understanding of these assets.

Let’s take the example of the level of quality of a dataset. If a data quality problem occurs, you would expect the Data Steward to point out the problems encountered by its customers to the Data Owner, who is then responsible for investigating and offering corrective measures.

To illustrate this complementarity, Chafika Chettaoui, CDO at Suez – also present at the Big Data Paris 2020 roundtable – confirms that they added another role in their organization: the Data Steward. According to her and Suez, the Data Steward is the person who makes sure that the data flows work. She explains:

“The Data Steward is the person who will lead the so-called Data Producers (the people who collect the data in the systems), make sure they are well trained and understand the quality and context of the data to create their reporting and analysis dashboards. In short, it’s a business profile, but with real data valence and an understanding of data and its value”. 

To conclude, there are two notions regarding the differentiation of the two roles: the Data Owner is “accountable for data” while the Data Steward is “responsible for” the day-to-day data activity.

Data Stewardship and Governance: The Data Steward’s Multiple Facets

Data Stewardship and Governance: The Data Steward’s Multiple Facets

Where Stewardship refers to the taking care of and the supervision of a specific property or organization, Data Stewardship refers to data supervision. Initially, the idea was that a domain expert would be in charge with qualifying and documenting data from their professional standpoint. In fact, Data Stewards are those who work closest to where the data is collected; they are often those who best understand the different aspects of data and the standards to which they must adhere to.

 

Data stewardship and governance: the responsibilities

In practice, Data Stewardship covers a wide range of responsibilities, depending on the maturity level of the organization. We can organize these responsibilities in four broad categories:

Operational supervision and quality

This refers to monitoring and supervising the complete life cycle of a dataset. 

More specifically, Data Stewards must define, and therefore implement, the necessary processes for the acquisition, storage, and distribution of datasets.

They must also ensure that the data produced fulfills the quality criteria that were defined (values, gaps, completeness, freshness, etc.) and that the procedures are put into place to evaluate and correct potential quality problems.

Documentation

A Data Steward is in charge of defining and documenting data and creating a glossary of industry-specific terms.

They must ensure that each element of a dataset possesses a clear definition and a specific use.

The documentation constitutes a collection of technical and functional metadata according to a meta model in common principle.

Conformity and risk management

Data protection and the management of regulatory risks or ethics is one of the most challenging aspects of the Data Steward’s role.

The regulatory environment around data is more restrictive and shifting. It’s up to them to ensure that the proliferation of data is framed by a collection of protocols ensuring conformity with the applicable standards – especially regarding privacy protection.

Security and access control

Finally, Data Stewards must define the rules governing data access.

These include the different levels of confidentiality and procedures, allowing the authorization of a person or group to access data.

Download our white paper “How does Data Democracy strengthen Agile Data Governance?” 

Orchestrated by a Data Management division, implemented by different types of Data Stewards, data governance must be deployed in an organization. To ensure this deployment, several operational models are conceivable in theory – decentralized, federated, centralized, etc. We think what distinguishes organizations is not the structure of their governance but the underlying culture of this organization. This culture has a name: Data Democracy.

What is a Data Steward?

What is a Data Steward?

Data stewards are the first point of reference for data and serve as an entry point for data access. They have the technical and business knowledge of data, which is why they are often called the “masters of data” within an organization! As the true guardians of data, let’s discover their role, missions & responsibilities.

Faced with the challenges of data exploitation and optimization, organizations are in need of specialists who can combine their actions with their knowledge of data.

In a recent article, we discussed the prerogatives and differences between Data Engineers and Data Architects. We also deciphered the missions of a Data Analyst, a Data Product Manager, and a Chief Data Officer. All of these specialists have the mission of making data speak, of giving it life, either by organizing it, by defining a strategy, or by manipulating it. To do so, they all have a common requirement: to work with quality data. 

This is the essential mission of the Data Steward, which is responsible for the quality of their data, which ultimately conditions all of the processes and decisions from a company’s data strategy.

 

The Data Steward’s multiple skills

To do so, a Data Steward must have strong communication skills and be able to distinguish the different types and formats of data. 

Acting as a point of convergence for all the data generated and used in the company, they must also ensure constant vigilance over the quality of their data in order to identify the priority data that needs to be cleaned or standardized.  

Versatile and multi-skilled, the Data Steward is considered the key contact for an organization in terms of data. So much so that they are often called the “master of data”. In order to live up to Data Stewardship requirements, this expert must be present on all fronts, as he or she plays a central role in the proper implementation of a data strategy.

 

What is the role of the Data Steward in the company?

Companies are reorganizing around their data to produce value and finally innovate from this raw material. Data Stewards are there to orchestrate the data in the company’s information systems. They must ensure the proper documentation of the data and facilitate their availability to their users such as Data Scientists or Project Managers, for example.

The essential role of the Data Steward is to supervise the life cycle of all available data, to ensure that its quality remains optimal. Behind the notion of data quality, there is also that of availability. The Data Steward, through his data quality missions, also contributes to ensuring that business teams can easily access the data they need. 

To give the notion of Data Stewardship its full meaning and scope, the “master of data” must be able to play the role of the bridge between the data and business teams. Working closely with the business lines and in constant partnership with the IT teams, the Data Steward not only helps to identify and collect data but also to validate and structure it. Their communication skills enable them to identify the people responsible for and knowledgeable about the data, to collect the associated information in order to centralize it and perpetuate this knowledge within the company. More specifically, Data Stewards provide metadata knowledge; a structured set of information describing a dataset. They transform this abstract data into concrete assets for the business.

Although there is no specific training for the Data Steward profession, the most commonly sought-after profile is that of an expert business user, familiar with data management techniques and data processing.

What are the Data Steward’s responsibilities?

The Data Steward must fulfill a wide range of missions. In particular, they must deal with the day-to-day management of data in the broadest sense of the term, ensuring that the processes for collecting and processing information are fluid. Finding and knowing the data, imposing a certain discipline in the management of metadata, and facilitating their availability to employees – These are just some of the issues that Data Stewards must address.

Once the data is collected, it is the Data Steward who is responsible for optimizing its storage and transmission to the business teams, after having created the conditions for indexing the data. As one of the key players in ensuring data quality, the Data Steward has another critical task: cleaning up the data by removing duplicates and eliminating useless information. To accomplish this, the Data Steward must ensure that the documentation of the data they manage is up-to-date.

Finally, as the Data Steward is also responsible for providing data access for all of your teams, they are constantly monitoring the security of their data assets, both with regard to external threats and internal dangers (particularly to the blunders of certain employees). Operational supervision of data, coordination of data documentation, compliance, and risk management, the Data Steward is a multi-faceted player who contributes to optimized data governance.