What is the Difference Between Data Governance and Data Stewardship?

What are they?

Data governance means setting internal standards—data policies—that apply to how data is gathered, stored, processed, and disposed of. It governs who can access what kinds of data and what kinds of data are under governance. Data governance also involves complying with external standards set by industry associations, government agencies, and other stakeholders. *

*Source (Google.com)

Data Stewardship is integral to data governance. It includes overseeing every aspect of the data lifecycle: creating, preparing, using, storing, archiving, and deleting data, in accordance with an organisation’s established data governance principles for promoting data quality and integrity.

In short, data governance refers to an organisation’s overall data initiative, whereas data stewardship implements the data governance policies for the data they look after. There might be many data stewards looking after different flavours of data from HR, to finance, even to business data!

Why is data stewardship important??

Data Stewardship is an essential and important part of data governance. A steward will ensure that users are held accountable for the data in their care, maintain the efficiency of data governance initiatives, define data elements, make data policies easier to understand, establish and maintain rules, and much more!?

So when an organisation develops a data governance strategy, it is the steward's job to ensure that these aims are met. Poor data stewardship can lead to confusion and chaos and be very damaging?

data stewardship best practices

Data stewards have many roles and responsibilities, but here are some core practices and methods that every steward should be following:

1. Document everything well!

Data stewards must document all decisions and policy changes so everyone within the organisation has access to up-to-date, reliable documentation. Held centrally, these can be placed anywhere but are usually found in metadata repositories or business glossaries.?

1. Clearly define roles and responsibilities

One of the roles of a data steward is to allocate and assign data roles. If? users are not aware of who is responsible for what with respect to data governance, they don’t know who to refer to and may misuse or avoid using data as intended altogether.?

1. Integrate with the data team

In sizable organisations, data stewards may be located in numerous different departments meaning their broader understanding and involvement in the company’s overall data plan may be limited.? Stewards should make a conscious effort to connect with other stewards and collaborate with the data team to make themselves aware of all data governance changes that impact the company and how data is used.?

What should I do now??

1. Learn more about the varied and interesting data roles within an organisation or expand your knowledge by becoming a DAMA-UK member here.
2. Share this content with a friend or colleague who might enjoy reading and learning from this.