What is the role of the Data Steward and Data Citizen today?

There are new roles emerging in the data space, but yet very few businesses have established a process to enable these new roles. The new roles revolve around this idea of being responsible for data quality of a particular set of data. The CRM is probably the best example in the past, of systems that are governed the most - as, if the CRM is of good quality, then proper sales forecasting can be achieved and more.

To know if you have these types of people at your work already, ask yourself this question, if the data quality of a system is bad, do you know who is responsible? Could this person be held accountable or even fired if the quality is not good enough or if initiative is not shown to make it better over time?

Even with this organisational governance in place, few have the technology needed to fuel these individuals with a good process around increasing the quality of data. A lot of this comes from the fact that this person may not know the context behind the data, they may not be the best person to qualify data. Hiring a data expert for your team will only fix certain things, but what about data that needs context e.g. How would a new team member know if “Eric Smith” is actually spelt “Erik Smith”? However this would be glaringly obvious to a sales person that speaks to Erik on a daily basis.