Data Ownership – The ‘Goldilocks Dilemma’

I was putting together some pages covering Data Governance – I’ve spent a lot of my recent contracts doing various aspects of Data Governance/Data management – and I felt I wanted to share a dilemma? Maybe that’s overstating it; maybe, heated discussion is better?

The definition of a Data Owner that I put forward was:

A Data Owner is a nominated individual who has responsibility for a particular data asset

In most conversations about Data Ownership, we see that it’s an executive-level role. It has to be a decision-maker, someone who sees the value in the data they are responsible for.

Almost by default we talk about executive-level, or maybe first tier down from board level.

During a recent piece of work, the project team had a discussion about this. Previous consultants had advocated for, and had publsihed a draft ownership model showing executive-level Data Owners. The group CFO, COO, etc were all noted as Data Owners.

Right level or not? (BTW here’s the page I drafted about Data Ownership)

We went through the predicatble points:

• The role needs seniority
• The role needs to focus minds
• The role needs to have a clear view of the downstream Data Landscape
• The role needs to abstract the data from the system(s)

These sorts of points – and you will be able to articulate your own versions of why ownership needs to be at a senior level – tripped off the tongue. Just when we thought that this had already been sorted, we stopped:

“But is a CFO (or any other C-level officer) too far removed from day-to-day operations to take on the responsibilities we want for a Data Owner?”

Here was our ‘Goldilocks  dilemma’  – senior enough to have sufficient gravitas, but not so senior that they were detached from playing an active role.

Our solution? We enhanced our roster. We started with:

Data Owner, Data Steward and Data Custodian

We finished with:

Data Sponsor, Data Owner, Data Steward and Data Custodian

Our Data Sponsor role had two principal themes:

1. Ensuring that Data Governance was supported and supported the data that needed it
2. Articulating the strategic goals for our data

We tweaked our Data Owner role to have the following key themes:

1. Decision making
2. Identifiying data opportunities

What do you think? Good solution? Bad solution? Does the ‘sponsor’ role really exist?