Data stewards play a crucial role in creating a winning data strategy. Alex Woodie explains what data stewards do in this article from Datanami:
At a high level, data stewards are individuals who are responsible for ensuring that an organization’s data is managed and ready to use. They’re in charge of making sure data is clean, defined, and able to be used for downstream analytics or even AI use cases.
According to Monica Richter, the chief data and analytics officer at Dun & Bradstreet, data stewards are broadly defined with five main responsibilities.
As Richter explains:
“Stewards should help you know what you have. They help you to inventory the data.
They should help you know what it means. They need to be able to define the data.
They should help you to know what databases are in your data lake. They have to be able to locate where to find the data.
They have to help you know whether you can trust the data, the data quality, where it’s sourced from.
Last but not least, they have to know what you can use it for. These are the data rights around it. These are potentially data regulations that might be important for that data.”
Of course, not all data stewards are alike, and they will bring different skills and have different responsibilities. Some data stewards work predominantly with corporate data, and perhaps may use a graph database to establish links between different groups. Other data stewards may work more closely in the data quality business, and be experts at using R or Python to build data cleansing routines.
