Everyone agrees that data is a precious corporate resource. Everyone also agrees that corporations should keep this resource clean, current and fit for business. Some in the data-management industry have stressed the need for a new corporate role, the data steward, who manages data in keeping with a broad business perspective and an eye toward organizationwide quality and standardization.

Data stewardship is an important business function, but there's no clear industry consensus about the need for a distinct data steward role. The core problem is that the role has no clear boundaries. Depending on whom you ask, a data steward may be simply a data-quality specialist or an all-powerful data governance, business intelligence and compliance czar. In most cases, the data steward role overlaps considerably with such established positions as business analyst, database administrator (DBA), data modeler, data manager, data security manager and storage manager.

Data steward, as a stand-alone job category, would have a tough time justifying its continued existence in periods of corporate austerity. Considering the extent to which data stewards handle functions performed elsewhere in the IT organization, they would be acutely vulnerable to the budgetary ax. What's the point of continuing to fund such a position when its core responsibilities can be easily distributed to other personnel?

However, data stewardship is too critical a business function to let die. It's everybody's job, on both the IT and business sides of the house. And it requires a governance environment in which an organization's users, analysts, DBAs and other personnel collectively monitor and maintain the quality, consistency, standardization and relevance of operational data. At the heart of that governance environment should be a corporate framework of policies, best practices and collaboration tools for managing data across the life cycle.

Collaboration is key to distributed data stewardship. For each important corporate data resource, organizations need to provide collaborative environments within which all stakeholders - including users, data owners, DBAs and developers - can work through the myriad issues concerning how information is modeled, classified, collected, profiled, cleansed, transformed, consolidated and reported. Using administrative workflows, discussion forums and other tools, IT and business personnel should be able to propose, discuss, define and monitor the full set of stewardship policies implemented within their master data management (MDM) environment.