Data Stewards are Already in the Building
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Data Stewards are Already in the Building

In the world of data governance, a common delusion :) is that hiring data stewards will solve the governance challenges. While it may seem logical to bring in new people specifically for these roles, it is not a best practice, especially when following the Non-Invasive Data Governance (NIDG) approach. NIDG is designed to make governance a natural part of day-to-day operations by leveraging the roles that already exist within an organization. Rather than hiring additional staff, the NIDG approach encourages formalizing the accountability for data within the existing workforce.

Why is hiring dedicated data stewards not the best strategy in this approach? First, data stewardship is not a new role but a responsibility that people already perform. Think about it: individuals throughout an organization are already interacting with, defining, producing, and using data daily. They may be doing this as part of their roles in business analysis, IT, operations, or even marketing. The NIDG approach recognizes this and builds upon these natural relationships with data, turning these existing responsibilities into formal stewardship roles . By doing this, data governance doesn’t feel like a separate, external task that requires extra resources, but rather something that people are already equipped to handle.

Another significant point is that hiring dedicated data stewards can lead to confusion. When you hire someone specifically for the stewardship role, there can be a disconnect between them and the people who truly understand the data – those already working with it every day. These newly hired stewards might struggle to integrate with teams, or worse, their authority may be questioned by those who feel they have been doing the job all along. The NIDG approach avoids this by embedding accountability within the existing structure, ensuring that the right people are formally responsible for the right data. This reduces friction and aligns data governance more closely with the organization’s natural workflows.

Finally, hiring new data stewards adds unnecessary costs and complexity. It introduces the need for new funding first, and then additional onboarding, training, and role integration, which can create delays in getting a governance program off the ground. On the other hand, by following the NIDG approach, organizations can move faster and more efficiently. Rather than incurring costs associated with hiring, they can focus on empowering current employees, providing them with the tools and frameworks they need to succeed in their governance roles.

To sum it all up, NIDG champions a more practical, cost-effective, and seamless way to implement data governance. By leveraging existing roles and responsibilities, you can build a sustainable and resilient governance program without the need for new hires. This not only saves time and money but also ensures that governance becomes part of the organization’s culture, rather than something imposed from the outside. Hiring data stewards may seem like a quick fix, but in the long run, the NIDG approach offers a far more sustainable and effective solution.

What do you think? How have you addressed data stewardship in your organization?

Non-Invasive Data Governance? is a trademark of Robert S. Seiner / KIK Consulting & Educational Services

Copyright ? 2024 – Robert S. Seiner and KIK Consulting & Educational Services


Franco Ricotti

Global Technology Consultant

1 个月

I completely agree with this suggestion (as well with meny others of yours). Exploiting the knowledge and competency in people already doing stewardship (even if unaware of it) it's extremely effective and also it increases trust in the data governance.

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Donna Frazier

NGA | Program Manager | for the Chief Data Officer

1 个月

Unfortunately any form of centralized data governance, from an agency CDO perspective, typically does require new hires because we cannot dictate to the individual program offices (there are many program specific data silos where they exist) what their data stewards should be doing. While we do spend a lot of time educating through our data governance council meetings and with our data certification training program, we are also in the process of deploying a non invasive centralized data management capability that will index/catalog all of our agencies data assets. It will be non-invasive because it will connect to the already existing data silos and produce analytics and reports on our agencies data, help us find duplicative data to help us manage our cloud and compute costs, and also has capabilities to enrich and condition the data, help us with data labeling and tagging, and making vast improvements to the state of the metadata within the data payload itself. We need a team to be able to work within the technology to help us with a lot of these data management tasks identified in the ICD 504 and continue to coordinate within the existing fragmented data silo framework.

Maria Hoffmann Jensen

Putting Quality in Data to X - for ?? | Head of Data Governance & Enablement | Assistant professor

1 个月

you are correct that they exist. most companies do not require or have the budget to employ data stewards that only do that. also, its not only the issue that they might not integrate well, but also that they might end up with ALL the data quality work. The others may think they they can continue to ignore it and go on as they always have. here is the the problem. data stewardship and quality work will be new tasks that will be competing with their current tasks and priorities. so there needs to be simple enough that the new tasks can be incorporated without major disruption to what is done on a day to day basis. if not, it will be all to easy to revert to whatever the daily tasks are, whatever the boss says they should focus on right now. so yes, they are there and they would need you to really think about how new tasks can be incorporated in their daily work. it would probably also be good to make their managers responsible for the the completion of the stewards work instead of a hybrid structure where the "data quality team" or "dataowner" is responsible for the steward work

Jesse Wilkins

I help guide organizations on their information journeys. Information governance | Records management | Consulting | Training | Speaker | Author

1 个月

I hope your ears were burning this week sir - Non-Invasive Data Governance was mentioned (favorably, of course!) several times at the ARMA New England Empower 24 conference.

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