Data Governance Roles (Data Owners, Data Stewards)

An effective data governance program depends on having clear owners, not just written policies. The data owner is the business person responsible for deciding who can access a data set and for what purpose, usually someone with knowledge of the area that generates or uses that information, while the data steward is responsible for the quality, documentation and operational application of the rules defined by the owner, acting as a link between the business and the technical teams. Without these roles defined, decisions about data access end up falling by default to the IT team, which lacks the business context to assess whether an access is reasonable. In practice, the absence of a clear data owner is one of the most common causes of access permissions to critical data that nobody reviews or justifies for years.