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Hadrien Diesbecq The 16 March 2022

Citizen Data Stewards Are Born for a Data-Centered Future

Data is the most precious capital of a business these days. Organizations try their best to effectively build and manage the data. This needs to go beyond traditional data management and share the ownership of key data characteristics with business stakeholders who can be defined as “citizen data stewards.”

‍Traditional Data Management & Emergence of Citizen Data Stewards

Data is widely known to be one of the business’s most valuable assets and it acts like money. Like currency itself, it is always fluctuating and evolving with its new types. Businesses are trading on a recent boom of new forms of structured and unstructured data. Every time a new line is created a new kind of data is born alongside it.

For years, businesses cleaned the data for analysis by using systems that needed high technical knowledge, a lot of time and expenditure.

The idea was to qualify and clean all the data, determine a system of categorization and create a record that acted as a reference for each business. That is, there were a group of people owning all the data, who were the center of different team’s specific data requests and had to adapt data to the teams’ needs. The group has been named Data Stewards.

The citizen data stewards have a deep understanding of the business meaning of data to the extent of their responsibilities. On the operating aspect, they know how data should be represented in database systems, and how they are related to each other.

Data stewards have the first finger on conflicts in definition and implementation between data systems as they provide documentation of the data included in a business to other groups of data workers.

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Yet this traditional data management process has consequences for the data that came before and for the businesses that use it. As technology advances, old data gets harder to read and slower to utilize. The process was so massive and centralized that it might take years to do a project or the project could end up analytically unreliable.

Citizen data stewards Enter the Field

The very new trend is changing the massive TDM into a more agile process, in which data analysis is divided into small pieces so that it could be done faster and with high quality. In order to actualize it, the businesses prefer this modern process to share data among key members of the company.

A primary success factor for these emerging trends is that it empowers business members to become citizen data stewards. They are able to define their master data and provide better data quality at a faster pace completely relevant to the business. Therefore, they truly achieve business goals. This is where the role of citizen data stewards flourish.

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Goals and Functions of Citizen Data Stewards

Citizen data stewards emerge to:

– Map and match relevant data for only precise use cases
– Monitor and assess the quality and accuracy of their scope business data
– Direct their master data
– Prepare right data for right use case
– Manage their private data ethically

To keep it simple, they prepare data as if the data are the ingredients of a dish to be cooked for their use cases. It enables businesses not to rely on a centralized team of data stewards to prepare data for them.

It’s Time to Shake Hands with Citizen Data Stewards

Nowadays, teams are on the path to have their own data stewards or more clearly to be their own stewards. It means they find themselves responsible to prepare their own data as no one else in the world knows their goals and promises to achieve.

However, data preparation is most of the time done manually in different companies which makes it a headache. Talking about huge data sets or just deciding to change something in the data sets sometimes even sounds impossible. Excel is a very famous tool for this manual process. Working with the tool which is primarily designed for accountants cannot be so easy. Customization and going row by row takes a lifetime. “Normalizing data manually is like inserting a nail in wood with a fork. No doubt, it will be inserted one day but we all agree that it takes a long time”, quoted by Sebastien Garcin, CEO of YZR.

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La philosophie des utilisateurs de YZR est d’être le marteau pour le clou. Il est conçu pour donner naissance à de nouveaux data stewards dans chaque entreprise. YZR étant considéré comme un outil no-code, les membres d’une entreprise ne possédant pas de compétences techniques peuvent préparer leurs propres données grâce à un outil conçu principalement pour être complet et permettre aux entreprises de nettoyer, de classer et de préparer des données appropriées à analyser.

C’est donc le bon moment pour que deveniez data steward. Dans un monde où les données seraient de l’or, il faudrait les préparer minutieusement afin d’en faire un carat.

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