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As executive increasingly agree that data is a corporate asset, they are also funding data governance and data quality efforts more willingly. But philosophical alignment is often the easy part. Entrenched organizational behaviors are much more difficult to shift. Many companies have introduced the role of data steward before fully defining the role. In these cases, the beleaguered data stewards are doomed before they even begin. 

Case in point: Greg, the director of BI at a health care provider, asked Baseline to participate in some core team meetings as he and his colleagues - a cross-functional group of managers responsible for launching data governance - were beginning a data stewardship effort. I made it to my client's meeting in time to find seven people huddled around Greg's laptop - and they were namedropping! Someone would mention a colleague's name and that would spark a fresh debate: 

"Felisha? What does she know about financial data?" 

"No, not Ben. He has no credibility with the management team. They'd kill him."

"Matt would be good. He's on the BI steering committee." 

In its efforts to put data stewardship in place, the core team had fallen into the trap I like to call "vital signs," as in, "He's breathing. He has a pulse rate ... He could be a data steward!" But assigning the role of data steward is more complex than that - or at least it should be.

Old Habits Die Hard 

All too often when planning a new initiative or assigning new roles, teams explore the "who" before understanding the "what" or the "how." In the process of working on the health care provider's data governance initiative, we'd broken the core team of some bad habits, one of which was too many meetings that led to too few decisions. To help them launch data governance, we guided the team through a methodical design process through which they formulated guiding principles, drafted decision rights and selected a high-profile launchpad project. They'd come a long way in setting up the program. But here they were trying to randomly assign warm bodies to a role that not only didn't exist, but needed a lot more clarification.

Many companies that adopted data stewardship early made the mistake of selecting staff members without much rigor or role definition. The newly appointed stewards would travel the corporate corridors, going from one meeting to another to represent data issues. Unfortunately, they didn't always deliver. As time passed, these data stewards became marginalized, and they would be excluded from milestone meetings and important decisions. "You're in this meeting, too?" a disingenuous manager once remarked to a newly minted (and ubiquitous) data steward. 

Anytime constituents begin questioning the value of a new job role, its days are probably numbered. This turned out to be true for the new data steward, but we were determined not to let the same fate befall Greg and his core team.

Six Tips That Work 

In Baseline's work launching data stewardship, we follow six tried-and-true techniques that have served our clients well. If you practice these, data stewardship will not only be accepted by your stakeholders, it will stick. 

1. Be Deliberate About the Organization 

There's no such thing as cookie-cutter data stewardship. Indeed, what data stewardship looks like depends a lot on the set of problems it's designed to address. While many insist that data stewardship should be a business function, if the problem is the quality of the data on the operational systems, the business might not have the right skills. Conversely, as IT educates the business on the value of data stewardship, it's important that the role is seen as a bridge between IT and the business, resolving data conflicts and inaccuracies, and deploying information in a structured and consistent way as the business moves forward. 

Whether your company introduces data stewardship in the business or in IT, pinpointing the pain will help you identify the best organizational fit.  

"Historically, we've done everything by line of business," says Todd Okuley, director of customer data governance for Nationwide Insurance. "In the past, data stewards were tied to individual organizations, and they could lose focus." As part of a new data governance effort targeted to customer data, Okuley and his team assigned data stewards according to the company's customer master data types: profiles, preferences, relationships and interactions. Okuley considers this significant: "Our new model is based on our data, not our organization," he says. "This ensures we get a sustainable stewardship model that provides a comprehensive knowledge of customer across Nationwide." 

2. Define Discrete Activities

In their zeal to build an organization, teams that take the "who" approach tend to overlook the work itself. While a data steward's tasks will evolve with the role, it's imperative that the team defines and communicates the work activities that will be performed. This positions the role of data steward as one of delivery and avoids the "roving linebacker" syndrome. The figure describes the set of activities identified as the initial tasks for a new data steward at a brokerage firm.

In this case, our client needed to launch data stewardship by assuring various lines of business that the data - including its definitions, its standards and its business rules - would be thoroughly profiled and documented. Because of this, the data steward was chosen based on his past experience with this type of work. Additional data stewards would be introduced as the initial role showed progress.