Data Governance vs. Data Stewardship
Data is a crucial asset for businesses in today's digital world. However, with the rising volume of data, managing it has become a complex task. This is where data governance and data stewardship come in. But what are they, and what's the difference between these two concepts?
Data Governance
Data governance is a framework that aims to ensure that data is consistent, accurate, complete, secure, and reliable for its entire lifecycle. It focuses on establishing policies and procedures for data management, control, access, and usage.
Some of the key components of data governance include:
- Data quality: ensuring that data is accurate and meets specific standards.
- Data security: protecting sensitive data from unauthorized access, theft, and misuse.
- Data privacy: ensuring that personal data is used and shared appropriately and in compliance with legal regulations.
- Data management: creating policies and procedures that govern the entire data lifecycle, from creation and acquisition to disposal.
Companies use data governance to create a consistent and reliable data environment that allows them to make informed decisions and meet legal and regulatory requirements.
Data Stewardship
Data stewardship is the management and oversight of data assets to ensure they are maintained, protected and maximized. It focuses on the daily operations of data management, ensuring that data is accurate, secure, accessible, and usable.
Some key responsibilities of data stewardship include:
- Data acquisition: ensuring that data is collected in a relevant and appropriate manner.
- Data processing: standardizing, cleaning, and transforming data to ensure its quality.
- Data documentation: maintaining documentation that describes the characteristics and usage of data.
- Data preservation: making sure that data is easily accessible, retrievable, and usable.
Data stewards are typically responsible for managing specific data domains and ensuring that the data is used appropriately to achieve business objectives.
What's the difference between Data Governance and Data Stewardship?
When it comes to data governance vs. data stewardship, many people confuse these two terms. At the core, data governance is the "what and why" and data stewardship is the "who and how".
To put it simply, data governance creates policies, plans, and strategies for managing data, while data stewardship implements these plans.
Data governance is an enterprise-wide approach that focuses on making strategic decisions about data management, while data stewardship is a tactical approach that involves managing and maintaining individual data assets.
Conclusion
Both data governance and data stewardship are essential concepts within the data management profession. While data governance is concerned with creating policies and procedures to manage data holistically, data stewardship focuses on the tactical day-to-day management of individual data assets. By understanding the differences between these two concepts, organizations can adopt a more holistic approach to data management and ensure data is used effectively and appropriately.