Data steward
An individual or group accountable for maintaining definitions, quality standards, security context, compliance rules, and issue resolution for an assigned data or knowledge domain.
Business example
People Operations acts as steward for the HR knowledge domain. It identifies the approved leave policy, records the intended audience and review date, resolves an obsolete duplicate, and retests employee questions after the source is updated.
How it works
- 1.Define the business domain, its approved terminology, and the assets that belong to it.
- 2.Set minimum metadata, quality, access, lifecycle, and review standards with the relevant business owner.
- 3.Review high-value or problematic assets and resolve duplicates, unclear definitions, stale content, and missing context.
- 4.Coordinate with technical custodians and subject-matter experts so policies become maintained source changes rather than informal answers.
- 5.Track quality and access issues through evidence, retest the affected questions, and update the domain standard when recurring patterns appear.
Common misconceptions
Related concepts
Related reading
Sources
- https://csrc.nist.gov/glossary/term/data_steward
- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/purview/data-governance-glossary
- https://docs.cloud.google.com/dataplex/docs/establish-foundational-data-context
Reviewed:
Reviewed by: Javier Chulvi Bernad · LLM Engineer · Madrid