Data Governance Organizations – the Subject Area Data Stewardship Subcommittee

In my last blog posting, I talked about the role of the Data Governance Coordinating Committee as the body that coordinates the work of Data Stewards in Enterprise Data Governance when cross-domain enterprise data alignment is needed and to provide a consistent approach to Data Stewardship. In this posting I will describe many of the requirements for a Subject Area Data Stewardship Subcommittee.

A key initiative to be undertaken prior to instituting Data Stewardship at the enterprise level is to develop a Subject Area Model (SAM) – the 10,000 foot level of detail model. This identifies and defines the key data subject areas found in the enterprise in order to delineate the activities of data stewardship, organizing the lower level components of the Enterprise Data Model, or EDM (of which, the SAM is the highest level component), and for other purposes. The SAM is used to identify what the subject areas of the enterprise are so that the appropriate Business Data Steward can be identified for the subject areas.

Some subject areas can be relatively simple and so the work of Data Stewardship might be able to be performed by a Business Data Steward and an assisting Technical Data Steward. Other subject areas, such as Patient and Provider, can be very complex or require significant oversight (e.g., for regulatory compliance, competition, etc.) and so may necessitate the formation of a Subject Area Data Stewardship Subcommittee, named after the subject area, such as in Figure 1 below.

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Figure 1 – Example Data Governance and Stewardship Organizational Chart

A Subject Area Data Stewardship Subcommittee should be chaired by the assigned Business Data Steward. When a Business Data Steward chairs a Subject Area Data Stewardship Subcommittee, he or she might be called a “Coordinating Data Steward.”

The Subject Area Data Stewardship Subcommittee might also include Technical Data Stewards, Subject Matter Experts, the Data Governance Program Manager, Data Architects, Data Modelers, Information Security Analysts, and others. Each functional area of the business that creates, modifies, or uses data in the subject area might have a representative to ensure the needs of the enterprise are covered.