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Data stewardship assigns accountable owners for datasets, pipelines, and glossary terms so questions about quality, lineage, and policy route to a named team instead of dissipating in chat threads.

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Enterprise feature

Full stewardship workflows—steward roles in the catalog, approval queues, and ownership reports—ship with Enterprise deployments. Smaller plans may expose basic owner fields without workflow automation.

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Steward roles

Organizations typically define:
RoleResponsibility
Business stewardDefines metrics, acceptable use, and domain definitions; approves business glossary changes
Technical stewardOwns pipeline health, schema evolution, and incident response for the asset
DelegateActs when the primary steward is unavailable; time-bounded in some orgs
Stewards appear on catalog pages, marketplace listings, and impact analysis results so engineers know whom to page.
Stewardship complements RBAC: stewards may not have super-admin rights; they are accountability contacts, not necessarily credential holders.

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Ownership assignment

1

Identify the asset

Open the table, stream, or pipeline in the data catalog or governance views.
2

Assign stewards

Set business and technical stewards (and optional delegates) from directory-backed users or teams.
3

Document scope

Add a short charter: refresh SLA, primary consumers, and escalation path.
4

Publish

Save; dependent certification badges may require steward sign-off before displaying.
Prefer team stewards for bus domains so vacation coverage does not stall approvals.

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Accountability workflows

Common patterns enabled with stewardship:
  • Certification requests route to stewards before an asset is promoted to “trusted.”
  • Deprecation requires steward-approved replacement links and sunset dates.
  • Access reviews list assets by steward so quarterly attestations stay tractable.
  • Incident bridges auto-include stewards when pipelines touching their assets fail repeatedly.
When reorganizations occur, bulk reassign stewards from governance reports; notify subscribers via catalog announcements.
For purchased feeds, assign a business steward who owns vendor relationship and a technical steward who monitors ingestion jobs.
Orphaned assets—no steward for 90+ days—often correlate with stale documentation and surprise schema changes. Run stewardship coverage reports monthly.

Data catalog

Where ownership and documentation surface to consumers.

Impact analysis

See downstream effects before steward-approved changes.