In previous chapters, we have touched on the importance of data steward roles. Whether these roles will exist within a formal data steward job title or within other job titles, most important is that these roles will truly support the concept and practice of data stewardship as an underlying discipline and success factor for MDM.
Data stewardship runs deep through all of Customer MDM, therefore the MDM plan needs to develop a firm concept of how a data steward model will look and function, where the data steward roles will be most critical, and how the right resources will be identified and engaged. Once the concept of data stewardship is fully recognized and a model is defined, it boils down to a combination of the people, processes, and a data caretaking focus that will establish the practice of data stewardship. These three critical elements are where we'll focus most of our time in this chapter.
But before we dive further into these elements, it's important to recognize that exactly who, where, and how data stewards will be engaged will be highly dependent on how the overall MDM and data governance practices will be defined and executed. Earlier in this book, while discussing the planning aspects of MDM, we pointed out that implementing a successful Customer MDM initiative starts with choosing the right approach that will drive the proper fitting of the MDM practices to an enterprise architecture and business model. The existing enterprise architecture and business model will consist of many specific functions, processes, teams, and job roles that already interact with the customer master data. Therefore, the concept and practice of data stewardship needs to be clearly embedded in the key junction points between the entry and management of the master data.
In this chapter, we will discuss many opportunities where these data steward roles can be applied, but it will be critical for the MDM core team and data governance council to sufficiently understand their business model, the ebb and flow of their customer data, and where to best inject data stewards so that the practice of data stewardship has a broad foothold to support a Customer MDM model. In any MDM model, data stewards cannot just be agents for data governance policy and standards; they need to also be closely aligned to the touch points and consumers of the master data where data entry, usage, and quality control can be most influenced.