Most organizations adopt a control-centric approach to data governance. However, they soon find that this top-down philosophy alienates users and gives data governance a bad name. Even worse, it can’t scale to meet the data demands of today’s enterprises.
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A modern approach to data governance requires trusting your users. In this article, we’ll outline the various data governance roles and how they work together in a democratized and scalable data governance framework.
Gartner’s Inaugural Magic Quadrant for D&A Governance is Here #
In a post-ChatGPT world where AI is reshaping businesses, data governance has become a cornerstone of success. The inaugural report provides a detailed evaluation of top platforms and the key trends shaping data and AI governance.
Read the Magic Quadrant for D&A Governance
Various data governance roles and their responsibilities #
A robust data governance team consists of data admins, stewards, custodians, and users.
The following table summarizes each of the data governance roles: Data Administrator, Data Steward, Data Custodian, and Data User.
| Aspect | Data Admin | Data Steward | Data Custodian | Data User |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Definition | Oversees the implementation of the 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
- Data governance roles: Who does what?
- Data admin
- Data steward
- Data custodian
- Data users
- Data governance roles and responsibilities: What’s next?
- How organizations making the most out of their data using Atlan
- FAQs about data governance roles
- Data governance roles and responsibilities: Related reads
Modern data stack requires a paradigm shift in thinking about data governance. Source: Towards Data Science.
In a similar vein, Saul Judah at 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. 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 we traditionally understand it, needs a paradigm shift. A major part of that shift is setting up the right data governance roles.
Data governance roles: Who does what? #
A data governance team has several roles, each playing a key part in leading your businesses toward a data-centric culture.
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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
Let’s explore the key facets of each data governance 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 data governance responsibilities of a 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.
Because data admins operationalize the entire data governance program, they should be seasoned members of the data team with a firm grasp of the business.
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. 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.
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.
Also, read -> Data steward vs. data owner
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, we’re seeing the two roles diverge.
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 data governance 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.
Data users #
Who is a data user? #
The goal of data democratization is to enable the use of data within an organization. Neglecting user’s needs will doom your data democratization plans from the start. That’s why you must treat the data user as a distinct data governance role.
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 often aren’t considered in a data governance framework. But without data users, data governance is meaningless. All the other data governance team 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.
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’s next? #
While each team member has a distinct role, these data governance roles depend on each other. Everyone 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?
How organizations making the most out of their data using Atlan #
The recently published Forrester Wave report compared all the major enterprise data catalogs and positioned Atlan as the market leader ahead of all others. The comparison was based on 24 different aspects of cataloging, broadly across the following three criteria:
- Automatic cataloging of the entire technology, data, and AI ecosystem
- Enabling the data ecosystem AI and automation first
- Prioritizing data democratization and self-service
These criteria made Atlan the ideal choice for a major audio content platform, where the data ecosystem was centered around Snowflake. The platform sought a “one-stop shop for governance and discovery,” and Atlan played a crucial role in ensuring their data was “understandable, reliable, high-quality, and discoverable.”
For another organization, Aliaxis, which also uses Snowflake as their core data platform, Atlan served as “a bridge” between various tools and technologies across the data ecosystem. With its organization-wide business glossary, Atlan became the go-to platform for finding, accessing, and using data. It also significantly reduced the time spent by data engineers and analysts on pipeline debugging and troubleshooting.
A key goal of Atlan is to help organizations maximize the use of their data for AI use cases. As generative AI capabilities have advanced in recent years, organizations can now do more with both structured and unstructured data—provided it is discoverable and trustworthy, or in other words, AI-ready.
Tide’s Story of GDPR Compliance: Embedding Privacy into Automated Processes #
- Tide, a UK-based digital bank with nearly 500,000 small business customers, sought to improve their compliance with GDPR’s Right to Erasure, commonly known as the “Right to be forgotten”.
- After adopting Atlan as their metadata platform, Tide’s data and legal teams collaborated to define personally identifiable information in order to propagate those definitions and tags across their data estate.
- Tide used Atlan Playbooks (rule-based bulk automations) to automatically identify, tag, and secure personal data, turning a 50-day manual process into mere hours of work.
Book your personalized demo today to find out how Atlan can help your organization in establishing and scaling data governance programs.
FAQs about data governance roles #
1. What is a data governance role? #
A data governance role refers to a specific position within an organization responsible for managing, protecting, and ensuring the quality of data. Key roles include data admin, data steward, data custodian, and data user, each with distinct responsibilities that contribute to effective data governance.
2. What are the 4 pillars of data governance? #
The four pillars of data governance typically include data quality, data management, data security, and compliance. These pillars ensure that data is accurate, accessible, secure, and used in accordance with regulatory requirements, fostering a culture of accountability and trust.
3. What is the role of IT in data governance? #
The IT department plays a critical role in data governance by implementing technical solutions for data management, security, and compliance. IT professionals collaborate with data stewards and custodians to ensure that data governance policies are enforced and that data systems are secure and efficient.
4. Who should be in charge of data governance? #
Data governance should ideally be overseen by a dedicated data governance team, which may include a Chief Data Officer (CDO) or a data governance committee. This team is responsible for establishing policies, standards, and practices that ensure effective data management across the organization.