Data Governance & Stewardship
This domain tests whether you can distinguish governance from stewardship and apply decision rights, policies, and accountability structures across data domains. ICCP DGSP questions often present a conflict (e.g., two business units define 'active customer' differently) and ask who decides, who executes, and what artifact records the decision.
Core rules and concepts
- Governance = exercise of authority and control over data management: planning, monitoring, enforcement. It sets 'what' and 'who decides,' not day-to-day 'how.'
- Stewardship = formal accountability for data content, quality, and use within a domain; stewards translate policy into business rules and resolve issues.
- Decision rights: data owner (accountable executive), data steward (responsible for definition/quality), data custodian (technical custody), data consumer.
- Governance bodies: executive sponsor/CDO, data governance council (cross-functional policy and escalation), stewardship council/domain teams (operational).
- Artifacts: data policy, standard, procedure, data domain charter, RACI, issue log, decision log, glossary entry.
- Models: centralized, federated, hybrid; hybrid is common - central council sets policy, domain stewards execute.
Worked example
Sales and Finance report different revenue because they define 'booked order' differently. The steward documents both definitions in the glossary; the governance council applies decision rights: the CFO as data owner for Revenue decides the enterprise definition; Sales and Finance stewards update reports and business rules; the custodian implements the change in the warehouse. Reasoning: governance supplies the decision right and escalation path; stewardship supplies the definition and quality checks; custodianship supplies implementation. If the council instead asks IT to 'fix the reports,' it has confused custody with ownership.
Traps
- Treating governance as an IT project or a one-time policy binder.
- Calling stewards 'data janitors' - they are accountable business roles, not cleanup staff.
- Writing policy without assigning decision rights or escalation.
- Using RACI loosely: multiple accountable owners for one domain.
- Skipping the decision log, so the same dispute recurs.