How do you identify individuals that would be well suited for a data stewardship role?

The best data stewards are people with a background in supporting the business processes for the data they'll be stewarding.  This includes roles like business analysts, product managers, or even project managers.  Engaging these roles into stewardship functions is the best way to ensure data management is aligned to business management.  

When identifying individuals well-suited for a data stewardship role, it's essential to consider the holistic nature of this position. Data Stewards serve as a crucial link between data professionals and the wider user community within an organization. They need a broad perspective on how the organization operates while also having a deep understanding of the nitty-gritty details of data creation, management, manipulation, storage, and utilisation. They are the ones who ensure data serves as an asset, not a liability. individuals well-suited for a data stewardship role requires a careful evaluation of their skills, knowledge, and attributes. Here are some key criteria and approaches for identifying individuals who would excel in a data stewardship role:

**Data Proficiency: Candidates should have a strong grasp of data concepts and analytics.

**Business Understanding: They should understand the organization's business processes and goals.

**Communication Skills: Effective communication, both written and verbal, is essential.

**Attention to Detail: A keen eye for data accuracy and quality is crucial.

**Problem Solvers: They should be skilled at addressing data-related challenges.

**Collaboration: Ability to work well with cross-functional teams.

**Regulatory Knowledge: Familiarity with data privacy laws and regulations is valuable.

**Experience: Prior roles in data management or governance are beneficial.

**Passion for Data: A genuine enthusiasm for data and its impact on business success.

There's a real misunderstanding because people use data stewardship differently, so there can be confusion over what to do. Personally, my definition of a data steward is the subject matter expert who's responsible for a subset of data.

A common way of using Data Governance roles  is to have data owners and data stewards. The data owners are the senior people that are accountable for a set of data. They're going to be really useful for their seniority, support and decision making, but they're not going to have time to get their hands dirty sorting out data issues or writing data definitions. For example, the data owner would own the whole of customer data, while the data steward would only own contact data because they work in marketing and they understand what customer contact is, what it's used for and why we use it. The data steward would be the one doing things like writing definitions and working with the data governance team to investigate and solve data quality issues. 

In my experience, it works best if you work hard to identify the correct senior person to be the data owner and then have them appoint one or more data stewards as the people who are going to be their subject matter experts in that data. The data owner knows who they would go to with questions about that data, and that way you tend to get the right people identified.