Data Governance and Enterprise Data Management

Data Governance and Enterprise Data Management

Data Governance Discipline

Data Governance Roles

1. Ownership – Ownership recognizes and formalizes a set of responsibilities of business managers but does not redefine the job of business management.
2. Stewardship – Data stewardship is the nexus of data governance. It provides linkage among owners of different but related data subjects. And it connects business rules and requirements with data models, database design, information systems implementation, and day-to-day management and administration of data.
3. Custodianship – custodianship recognizes and formalizes responsibilities of data specialists but doesn’t redefine their jobs.

Custodianship versus stewardship

Custodians are responsible for the “buckets” that store the data, and for the systems that process it; stewards are responsible for the “content”—the data itself.

In Data Governance groups, responsibilities for data management are increasingly divided between the business process owners and information technology (IT) departments. Two functional titles commonly used for these roles are Data Steward and Data Custodian.
Data Stewards are commonly responsible for data content, context, and associated business rules. Data Custodians are responsible for the safe custody, transport, storage of the data and implementation of business rules. Simply put, Data Stewards are responsible for what is stored in a data field, while Data Custodians are responsible for the technical environment and database structure.

IT is the custodian of an organization’s data assets. This department gathers business requirements, develops the application systems, operates these systems and supports their users. Further, it manages the infrastructure on which these applications operate and ensures that the data is properly stored and protected. Data protection, for example, might be accomplished by providing a security system and periodic backups. To perform this role, IT establishes processes such as the system’s development methodology, facilitates the development of the business data model, and sets security administration and enforcement policies. 

Business representatives (stewards) must retain responsibility for the data content. Stewards define the requirements, verify that systems meet them and use the systems. The business representatives also have a data protection responsibility. This includes determining who can retrieve what data and enforcing access restrictions.
The table below contrasts some of IT’s custodianship duties with stewardship responsibilities performed by business representatives.

Custodianship versus stewardship responsibilities Ultimate success depends on cooperation among data stewards as well as a strong ongoing partnership between stewards and custodians.

Custodianship—IT Stewardship—Business Create the business data model. Facilitate creation of the business data model, maintain it and apply it for data management database design. Contribute to the business data model. Provide the business rules, definitions, etc. Gather business requirements. Interview data stewards and other business representatives to define the business requirements. IT team members gathering the requirements must apply interviewing and analytic skills to ensure that they ferret out the requirements and translate these into the information required to understand what needs to be designed and built. Provide business requirements. Work with IT analysts during the system development and provide them with the requirements. Establish data access restriction facilities. Install security mechanisms that enable data access restrictions. Determine who can access what data. Input information on who has access capabilities into the data access restriction facilities. Deliver quality data with supporting audits and controls, and resolve deficiencies. Build systems that meet business expectations and provide evidence (through audits and controls) that the data has been processed correctly. Errors disclosed through audits and controls indicate data processing deficiencies and must be addressed by IT. Establish quality expectations and ensure compliance. Ensure that realistic quality expectations are consistent with business processes. In addition, ensure that the data conforms to the quality expectations. Incorporate changes as needed. Continuously communicate with the data stewards and other business representatives to keep informed about business changes that impact the systems and data. When these occur, gather detailed requirements and incorporate the changes to the existing environment. Keep IT informed of business changes that impact data. As the business environment evolves, changes are needed in systems and data to ensure that they continue to support the business. Information about these changes must be transmitted to IT on a timely basis to ensure that the data asset can be appropriately leveraged.