What is Data Stewardship?
Data Stewardship has, as its main objective, the management of the corporation’s data assets in order to improve their reusability, accessibility, and quality. It is the Data Stewards’ responsibility to approve business naming standards, develop consistent data definitions, determine data aliases, develop standard calculations and derivations, document the business rules of the corporation, monitor the quality of the data in the data warehouse, define security requirements, and so forth (see Table 1 for a list of the data integration issues determined by Data Stewards). This data about data, or meta data, developed by Data Stewards can then be used by the corporation’s knowledge workers in their everyday analyses to determine what comparisons should be made, which trends are significant, that apples have indeed been compared to apples, etc. Just as the demand for a data warehouse with good data has grown, the need for a Data Stewardship function has likewise grown. More and more compan
