S1: Building a Data Stewardship Practice

More and more companies are coming to terms with the fact that they need to have a data stewardship function in order to be effective in collecting metadata (including definitions, derivations, and data quality rules), MDM, and data quality. A lot has been said and spoken about why stewardship is important, but HOW do you do it and be effective with limited resources (in the “real world”)?

This presentation details how to set up a data stewardship function, how to run it, the details of managing the stewardship committee, recruiting help from IT for technical stewards, what the duties of the data stewards are, and what decisions they have to make. In addition, it covers how to staff projects for stewardship and funnel the information from projects back into the overall stewardship process.

You will learn:

The relationship between governance and stewardship
How to build a governance and stewardship organization
How to recruit stewards
What the steward’s responsibilities are
What the stewardship process looks like
How to break up responsibilities by functional area
Resources you can use to minimize endless meetings
What the decision process is
The use of stewards for projects
What and how to document decisions

David Plotkin is the Global Head of Data Stewardship for a large insurance company, working in Enterprise Data Solutions. He is responsible for rolling out data stewardship as part of an overall Data Governance and Data Management effort. This includes creating a stewardship strategy, training, and leading the stewardship community, as well as specifying the requirements for the data stewardship tool suite (Collibra and IBM). He has previously been a consultant for EMC, working on data quality, data governance and master data management engagements at client companies. He has also previously managed Data Governance at an insurance company and managed data quality at two large banks. He has been working with data governance, data modeling, metadata and data quality for over 25 years. He is a popular speaker at DAMA chapters and conferences, and serves as a subject matter expert on many topics around metadata, data governance, and data quality.