Data Governance Roles and Their Responsibilities: A Complete Round Up
Last Updated on: March 28th, 2023, Published on: August 11th, 2022.
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Most organizations adopt a control-centric approach to data governance. So, they develop a plan with policies to restrict access and design data governance roles and responsibilities to enforce these rules.
Such plans embrace harsh security measures to protect data, manage risks, and ensure regulatory compliance. However, such an approach doesn’t enable data collaboration and data-driven decision-making. That’s why over time, data governance seems to have become something to be afraid of, whereas it should be celebrated.
Various data governance roles and their responsibilities
A robust data governance team consists of data admins, stewards, custodians, and users.
Here’s a table summarizing each of the data governance roles.
| Aspect | Data Admin | Data Steward | Data Custodian | Data User |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Definition | Oversees the implementation of the entire data governance program | Act as a bridge between business and IT so that business users can access the right data | Deals with the movement, security, storage, and use of data | Uses data to draw insights from it for business decision-making |
| Top responsibility | - 1. Processes and transforms data for modeling while ensuring its integrity and usability - 2. Serves as the escalation points for resolving all data-related conflicts | - 1. Helps standardize data definitions, rules, and descriptions - 2. Helps define access policies and optimize data-related workflows and communication | - 1. Oversees data access and storage - 2. Identifies data stewards for various data domains and collaborates with them on data quality issues | - 1. Understand the data governance policies, standards, rules, and definitions - 2. Use tools from the modern data stack to extract value from data |
| Technical or business? | Both | Business | Technical | Business |
| The ideal fit | A seasoned or veteran data team member with a good grasp of both business and technical aspects | A senior data team member with deep domain knowledge and familiarity with the data stack | A senior engineer or scientist within the data team who can navigate through the modern data stack | Marketers, salespeople, researchers, senior executives and business managers |
Table of contents
- Various data governance roles and their responsibilities
- Who is responsible for data governance?
- Data admin
- Roles and responsibilities of a data admin
- Data steward
- Roles and responsibilities of a data steward
- Data custodian
- Roles and responsibilities of a data custodian
- Data users
- Roles and responsibilities of a data user
- Data governance roles and responsibilities: What is next?
- Data governance roles and responsibilities: Related reads
Modern data stack requires a paradigm shift in thinking about data governance. Source: Towardsdatascience.com
In a similar vein, Gartner states,
“Responding to varying levels of uncertainty in today’s world requires speed and agility, and traditional approaches to data governance are becoming obsolete,” says Saul Judah, VP Analyst at Gartner. “A typical ‘one-size-fits-all,’ command-and-control-based IT governance capability has neither the scope nor the agility to meet the needs of digital business.”
Modern business and data analytics teams require adaptive data governance. Source: Gartner
That means data governance as it is traditionally understood, needs a paradigm shift. Now that we have understood the change in approach to modern data governance, the first step is to set up the right team.
Who is responsible for data governance?
A data governance team has several roles, each playing a key part in leading your businesses toward a data-centric culture.
While every organization has unique goals, needs, and structure, here are the four most common data governance roles:
- Data admin
- Data steward
- Data custodian
- Data user
Who is responsible for data governance?
Let’s explore each role and its part in shaping the data governance policy, standards, and functions.
Data admin
Who is a data admin?
Data administrators oversee the implementation of the entire data governance program and serve as the escalation points for resolving all data-related conflicts.
Functionally, a data admin is responsible for processing and transforming data into the best data models.
Roles and responsibilities of a data admin
The responsibilities of data admin are:
- Ensure the usefulness of data: This includes overseeing data transformations, monitoring data flow within the organization, and designing data models. It also requires planning, implementing, and maintaining data repositories such as databases, warehouses, and lakes.
- Enable data analytics for decision-making: This involves handling all training and onboarding requirements for technical and business users.
- Ensure data integrity: This requires tracking data lineage throughout the organization to make sure that the data is credible, relevant, and updated.
Depending on the organization, data admins may also be responsible for database administration tasks, such as maintaining the data dictionary, choosing the right tools — software and hardware — and monitoring database performance.
Also, since data admins operationalize the entire data governance program, you should look for seasoned members of the data team with a good grasp of the business.
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Data steward
Who is a data steward?
Data stewards make sure that business users can consistently access high-quality data. Here’s how the author of Disrupting Data Governance, Laura Madsen, puts it:
“Data stewards were meant to help solidify the squishy… They speak the language of IT and translate that back to the business. The role requires the patience of a kindergarten teacher and the ability to negotiate a hostage situation successfully.”
Data stewards are the bridge between business and IT, and their core function is to enable collaboration and data democratization.
Moreover, they help organizations comply with the ever-changing regulations by assessing the data governance policy, processes, and implementation.
Roles and responsibilities of a data steward
The responsibilities of data stewards vary depending on their organizations and role.
However, some of their primary responsibilities include:
- Creating data assets: Data stewards own data asset creation, policies, and security.
- Ensuring data quality: Data stewards help standardize data definitions, rules, and descriptions. This provides context to data assets. Data stewards also work with the rest of the data governance team to evaluate, manage, and monitor data quality throughout the organization.
- Protecting the data assets: Data stewards are crucial in establishing data security protocols that align with the organization’s data governance goals, policies, standards, and compliance requirements. They also assess potential threats to data security and consult with the IT team to alleviate them.
- Defining access policies: Access policies dictate which data users can access specific data assets. Data stewards help set them up so that the right users have access to all the data they need instantly.
- Optimizing workflows and communications: Data stewards help data users — technical and business — search, discover, trust, and use the data they need. That’s why they play a crucial role in data collaboration and sharing.
When hiring data stewards for data governance roles, you should look for a senior data team member who blends engineering or analytics skills with their business acumen and deep domain knowledge.
Data custodian
Who is a data custodian?
Another crucial data governance role is that of the data custodian. A data custodian deals with the movement, security, storage, and use of data.
There's no difference between a data steward and a data custodian for most businesses. However, with the growing sophistication of data governance, a separation between the two is beginning to occur.
Roles and responsibilities of a data custodian
Unlike data stewards, the role of a data custodian is more on the technical side.
Some of their responsibilities include:
- Controlling data access: Data custodians authorize and control access to data. They’re responsible for managing the technical aspects of setting up and implementing permission controls.
- Collaborating with data stewards: Custodians identify data stewards for each data asset or domain. They also work with data stewards to fix any data quality or integrity issues.
- Overseeing data storage: Data custodians handle the technical aspects of data storage, versioning master data, and setting up system backups and a disaster recovery plan. They also handle staffing requirements for data governance teams.
While hiring, you should look for a senior engineer or scientist within the data team capable of navigating seamlessly through the modern data stack.
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Data users
Who is a data user?
The goal of data democratization is to enable the use of data within an organization. So, data governance roles are not complete without including the data user.
A data user is anyone within the organization who extracts value from data. Data users include marketers, researchers, executives, business managers, senior executives, and more.
Data users are often not considered in a data governance framework, but they play a key role in the success of an organization’s data governance framework.
Without data users, data governance wouldn’t be effective. All the other data governance roles — data admins, data stewards, and data custodians — exist to help data users with data-driven decision-making.
Roles and responsibilities of a data user
The main role of a data user is to drive use-case implementation of data assets within the organization and champion data-driven decision-making.
In organizations, The responsibilities of data users are:
- Attend training and educational sessions on data governance, access, and use
- Use tools such as data dictionaries, catalogs, and knowledge bases to find and extract value from data sets
- Interact with the other members of the data governance team, such as data stewards and data custodians, to understand and use data
- Bring the data governance team’s attention to data sets with quality or credibility issues
- Ensure that they follow appropriate security measures to protect sensitive data
Data governance roles and responsibilities
Data governance roles and responsibilities: What is next?
While each team member has a distinct role, these data governance roles depend on each other. Therefore, they must collaborate effectively to help their organization achieve its business and data goals.
Despite their unique skill sets, these roles within the data governance team achieve the best results through collaboration, sharing, and transparent communication.
Setting the right team is just one of many steps in effectively employing data governance in your organization, want to know more?
Learn more → 6 commonly referenced data governance frameworks in 2023
Data governance roles and responsibilities: Related reads
- Data Governance in Action: Community-Centered and Personalized
- Data Governance and Its Importance in the Modern Data Stack
- Data Governance Framework — Examples, Templates, Standards, Best practices & How to Create One?
- Snowflake Data Governance — Features, Frameworks & Best practices
- Open Source Data Governance Tools - 7 Best to Consider in 2023
- Data Governance Policy: Examples, Templates & How to Write One
- 7 Best Practices for Data Governance to Follow in 2023
- Benefits of Data Governance: 4 Ways It Helps Build Great Data Teams
- Data Governance Roles and Responsibilities: A Quick Round-Up
- Key Objectives of Data Governance: How Should You Think About Them?
- The 3 Principles of Data Governance: Pillars of a Modern Data Culture
- A Guide to Gartner Data Governance Research — Market Guides, Hype Cycles, and Peer Reviews
- 5 Popular Data Governance Certification & Training in 2023
- 8 Best Data Governance Books Every Data Practitioner Should Read in 2023
- Automated Data Governance: How Does It Help You Manage Access, Security & More at Scale?
- Data Governance and Compliance: Act of Checks & Balances
- Data Governance vs. Data Management: What's the Difference?
- Enterprise Data Governance — Basics, Strategy, Key Challenges, Benefits & Best Practices.
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