Administrative Details- Meetings


Data Governance Council
Wednesday May 2, 10:00 - FDH 756

Data Stewards

Data Stewards are appointed by Executive Sponsorship Group to carry out the data policies that have been established, as well as the University's overall administrative data security policies. Data Stewards are responsible for making known the rules and procedures to safeguard the data from unauthorized access and abuse. They authorize the use of data within their functional area, and monitor to verify appropriate data access. They assist University data users by providing appropriate documentation and training to support institutional data needs.
There are 3 types of data stewards

  1. 1. Subject data stewards whose responsibility for data stored in their own operational unit of the University,
  2. 2. Technology, representing the technology component corresponding to the subject area,
  3. 3. "Communities of interest". Community of interest stewards are responsible for data elements when ownership is shared across organizational boundaries. One steward will be responsible for collaborating with others to be the "owner". An example is address data, shared among all units who have persons in their data bases.

One individual could serve as a data steward for more than one subject area, and could be both a subject data steward and a "community of interest" data steward.


Subject Data Stewards are responsible for defining the procedures, data meanings and requirements, and for implementing policy in their own subject area. They are responsible both for the business processes, and for the data in their unit. One person could be the subject data steward for multiple area, depending on their job responsibilities.

  1. 1. Assigning each item of administrative data to one of the following three security levels: Unrestricted, University Confidential, or Restricted sensitivity. See OIT Policy IS02, Information Sensitivity and Classification for further explanation of each category. Approving access requests and authorizing use of data.
  2. 2. Regularly verifying the accuracy of existing authorizations for individuals in their departments and monitoring for inappropriate access activity.
  3. 3. Providing data descriptions for data dictionaries that will let data users know what shareable data are available, what the data mean, and how to access the data stored within the databases for which they are responsible.
  4. 4. Ensuring the rules and conditions that could affect the accurate presentation of data are well known by data users and supporting them in the use and interpretation of administrative data, primarily through documentation, training, and problem resolution.
  5. 5. Establishing procedures and standards for initial definition and change of data elements within their domain.
  6. 6. Specifying data viewing, copying or downloading procedures that are unique to a data element or data repository.

Community of Interest Steward

A community of interest data steward is probably already a subject data steward in their primary area, although not necessarily. They have the additional responsibility of organizing a small group of stewards whose data crosses organizational boundaries, and which has to be shared with common definitions and values. An example is data related to persons. Someone from Human Relations might be designated to be responsible for contact information, while someone from the student area might be responsible for demographic information (age, gender, etc). There would in this example be a community of interest data steward for personal contact data, and another for personal demographic data. Any decision or action regarding data that crosses organizational boundaries will be the result of collaboration and consensus, but is the Community of Interest steward who is responsible for that negotiating and communication of decisions. Any disagreements or differences in perceived need will be directed to the Executive Sponsorship group for resolution.


Technical Data Steward

The technical data steward works with the aligned subject data steward on the same system or database. They have the operational responsibility for the maintenance of the data base/system environment that supports the application. These will be individuals with IT experience and skills.
Their expertise will be valuable in locating and implementing tools (ex. Metadata Management products, repository) that will be part of the data governance and managed data environment.

Return to Agenda of May 2 2007 Meeting