In my last blog posting, I talked about the role of the Data Governance Board as the key decision making body in Enterprise Data Governance. The decisions which the Data Governance Board should make should be highly strategic in nature – you don’t want executives and senior leaders sitting around arguing over fine distinctions in the Enterprise Data Model, data element naming standards, or the detailed processes for measuring and improving data quality.
However, these (and other) more tactical Data Governance decisions still need to be decided by an enterprise level body. The Data Stewardship Coordinating Committee (see Figure 1) is the appropriate organization for making these types of decisions, as well as for determining a common approach to data stewardship (e.g., use of a business glossary, development of common stewardship templates), and for resolving more tactical conflicts and issues.
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Figure 1 – Example Data Governance and Data Stewardship Organizational Chart |
The Data Stewardship Coordinating Committee is typically chaired by the Chief Data Steward along with the Data Governance Program Manager. All of the Business Data Stewards, who coordinate Data Stewardship for a domain or subject area across the enterprise, participate in the Data Stewardship Coordinating Committee. In addition, the Enterprise Data Architect and key Technical Data Stewards participate as well. As with the Data Governance Board, the Data Stewardship Steering Committee needs to be business focused, and so there will be more business than IT representation on this committee.
The activities undertaken by the Data Stewardship Coordinating Committee will depend upon the scope and authority granted it by the Data Governance Board. This committee needs to take a cross-domain perspective – issues which are specific to a domain should primarily be addressed by the domain Business Data Steward and those Technical Data Stewards, Data Owners (owners of data in an application), and Subject Matter Experts (SME) which assist the Business Data Steward, perhaps in a domain specific Data Stewardship Sub-Committee.
Examples of key activities performed by the Data Stewardship Coordinating Committee include:
- Review and implemention of decisions reached by the Data Governance board
- Development of common Data Stewardship processes and templates
- Review of the Enterprise Data Model and Enterprise Data Architecture
- Proposal and development of enterprise data standards (to be approved by the Data Governance Board)
- Resolution of Data Stewardship issues and conflicts, and issues/conflicts not requiring intervention of the Data Governance Board
- Determination of System of Record
- Ensure that glossary and metadata environments are in place to support Data Stewardship
- Measuremeant and improvement of the Data Stewardship program
As I mentioned in the prior blog post, Data Governance and Stewardship organizations are typically rolled out in a phased manner. The Data Governance Board needs to be in place first as Data Stewardship is empowered by the Data Governance Board.
