What Is Data Stewardship?

Data stewardship encompasses the management, organization, security and quality of data and ensures it’s usable and easily accessible to those who need it. It’s essential for any business in the digital age. It has tremendous value in making strategic business decisions and predictions and providing employees with the knowledge they need to do their jobs efficiently.

At Anomalo, we provide an all-in-one, industry-leading automated data quality monitoring platform to help keep your data accurate and organized.

Importance of Data Stewardship

Data stewardship and data governance work together for effective data management. Data governance is the establishment of policies that protect data against corruption, misuse and loss, and data stewardship is the process that ensures compliance with governance policies. The following points are the data steward responsibilities that fit into an organized data stewardship framework for effective governance:

• Records: Know what data the organization possesses.
• Placement: Understand where the data is at any given time.
• Accessibility: Allow the data to be easily accessible by those who need it. 
• Security: Establish clear security protocols to protect company data.
• Policy adherence: Continually enforce data governance policies on how employees use company data.
• Data accuracy: Verify that the data and its lineage are accurate and transparent through data quality monitoring and anomaly detection.
• Capitalization: Help the company capitalize upon its data stores to advance company goals by guaranteeing trustworthy data.

Proactive Data Issue Resolution

Anomalous data can cause cascading effects on projects downstream, so companies must deploy methods for identifying and addressing data anomalies before challenges occur. Deploying a machine learning anomaly detection system that monitors data values, evaluates data patterns, automates routing and adapts to data is an excellent way of enabling data issue resolution.

Promoting Data Quality and Compliance

Data stewards must establish and follow a data governance framework that includes:

• Regular data quality assessments.
• Data entry training for users.
• Automated data cleaning.
• Effective application programming interface (API) management.
• Creation and checking off of compliance checklists.

By following these policies, a company can have robust data stewardship and build trust in its organizational data, which will be accurate, accessible and secure.