Data Governance Blog

Data Steward v. Data Custodian – What’s in a name?

Some time ago, on a project far, far, away, we spent a good deal of time trying to define roles around data governance. We recognized that both the business and the technology teams were key contributors in our fledgling data governance program. What was proposed was that Data Stewards were on the business side of the fence and the experts on context and definitions. The IT staff would be called Data Custodians who were responsible for the safe handling of the data while it was in their custody. What has me chuckling to this day was the aftermath of that discussion.

When we got into the room with the key stakeholders you could tell that something was brewing. There was a little more tension than we normally see at these meetings. As we pressed through the opening of the meeting, we reached the Roles and Responsibility section of the agenda. Right from the start Ben, the manager of the DBA’s, quite vehemently objected to being call a custodian and that he considered it demeaning.

“We are data and IT professionals, calling us data custodians makes it sound like we push brooms and clean up other peoples messes.”

As I pondered our data cleansing project, it was hard for me to resist the tempation to  argue with his reasoning. No one else bit either, so we ended up going with Business Data Steward and IT Data Steward

The next week, when we met again and continued our work on roles and responsibilities, Randy piped up. “I did a little research on the name we chose. It turns out the word steward is derived from the Old English name sty ward, or keeper of the sty. So in reality instead of being known as broom pushers cleaning up messes, we are now defined as those in charge of shoveling  pig sh#%!”

We absolutely howled with laughter. Except for Ben, who really wasn’t too amused.

The lesson here is that what we call the workers doing the daily work of governing data  really does not matter . What really matters is that the roles are defined and the staff engaged and supported. Both the business and the technology staff have very important contributions to make to keeping data clean and data quality high. Failing to do any of it will really evolve the role into Data Sty Wards.

Footnote: Since this was first published, it has been among the most popular posts for readers looking for a good definition for data steward. For those reasons a more serious post was written with good usable definitions with roles and responsibilities. Here is a link to that post.

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Thanks for stopping by. My writing is intended to take a lighter look at Data Governance, and toss in some pragmatic advice along the way.  If you are interested in more information on how to implement Data Governance in your organization, please contact me via LinkedIn or the email address below.

Regards,
Tom Jesionowski

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