In many organizations, data stewards are the most knowledgeable subject matter experts for the organization’s data. Many data stewards are not offered any formal training on how to be a data steward. The lack of trained data stewards diminishes the role’s importance and effectiveness. Over time, poor practices emerge, implementation of data governance policies declines, the level of organizational data quality is reduced, and the level of staff data literacy is not improved. In this blog post we will discuss what needs to be included in data stewardship training – general information, soft skills and specific to the data stewards.
Data stewardship is where the real data governance work gets done. Data stewards perform the day-to-day work of administering the organization’s data. It is the data stewards who are accountable for this work, and data stewardship essentially formalizes this accountability. The better the data stewards are trained the better their data governance work will be.
The data governance and data stewardship organization has a structure. Included in this structure is a data governance governing committee, board, team, group or council (committee). The training is the responsibility of this main committee. Check out our blog post titled “Lets Talk Data Governance Committee”.
If done properly, data stewardship achieves its goals, providing job satisfaction and a sense of adding value to the participants. Data stewards work together as a team, see the results of their efforts and end up doing less, but more effective, work. If not done properly, data stewardship can overwhelm the data stewards, leading to frustration and pushbacks from them. A good data steward training program improves the happiness of the data stewards and helps the organization.
For all employees (including the data stewards) at the organization there should be training (see our blog posts “Effective Data-Related Onboarding and Training” and “Right Away, Give New Employees Training on Data Governance”) on general data governance items including:
- understanding data governance, data catalog, and data intelligence: definitions, benefits and overview
- company, organization, or institution structure (various departments)
- data governance organization, framework, and structure
- various data governance-related resources such as web pages and wikis
- data governance-related processes such as data-related requests, business glossary updates, new report requests, and reporting of data quality issues from data requester side
- data governance-related content such as specifications, policies, and definitions and how to access this content in the data governance knowledge base
Data stewards play an extremely important role in many of the organization processes and initiatives that work with data. This importance needs to be communicated to all employees. These roles include inspecting and improving data quality, creating data-related content, handling of data-related requests, managing reference data, and specifying how data elements should be classified for security and privacy purposes. Part of the training should be on the different types of data stewards (functional, technical, triage, hybrid).
One area that should be stressed in the training is the importance of data governance and data stewardship in key organization initiatives including technology projects, data quality initiative, implementing a new reporting solution or warehouse, or making the staff more data literate.
Soft skills are very important for data stewards. Check out this blog post on “Soft Skills and Traits of a Good Data Steward”. Suggested items that should be included in data steward training are how to lead meetings, managing conflicts (people and data definitions), how to gain consensus, how to build relationships, how to communicate better, and how to get collaboration across various groups.
Specific training for data stewards should include the following (suggest a wiki page that contains the training information) so that data stewards know and understand:
- Who has the overall data governance responsibility at the organization including how to contact them and what they are responsible for (such as providing training and handling conflicts)
- What are the data governance goals for the organization
- What is the data governance roadmap and the priority tasks that need to be done
- How is data governance support gained including responsiveness, communicating status, prioritization, and updating the data governance knowledge base
- Where are the organization’s data policies located, who reviews policies and who updates these policies
- What data does the organization use, where is the data system inventory and how to request access to a specific data system
- How data stewardship helps data quality
- How is reference data set up and maintained
- What are the data governance-related processes such as data-related requests, business glossary updates, new report requests, and reporting of data quality issues from data steward point of view including resolution and root cause analysis
- How does data governance content (data policies, report specifications, reference data, data quality rules, data system inventory entries, glossary definitions, etc.) get created and updated including their points of engagement
- What is the data governance communication plan and how do data stewards support the communications
- What are the tools related to data governance that are used in the organization, including integrating such tools with existing systems
- How do data stewards’ interface with data consumers, IT, other data stewards, and the data governance leadership
- What are the data stewardship metrics – Data stewards require resources and effort be expended to improve how the organization understands and manages its data. Therefore, metrics measure and report the progress made. Training on any data governance metrics such as number of requests made, number of requests resolved, number of data governance-related content created, etc. should be done. Feel free to read our post titled “Data Intelligence and Data Governance - How and What to Measure”.
Hope you found this blog post beneficial. Additional data steward resources (blog posts, videos, and recorded webinars) can be found on our Data Stewart Spotlight page.
IData has a solution, the Data Cookbook, that can aid the employees and the organization in its data governance, data intelligence, data stewardship and data quality initiatives. IData also has experts that can assist with data governance, reporting, integration and other technology services on an as needed basis. Feel free to contact us and let us know how we can assist.
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