Data stewardship is an essential role in modern data governance. Every data-driven organization needs to have stewards who can quickly resolve data management problems and challenges. Data stewards facilitate consensus about data definition, quality, and usage. They guide activities to complete metadata, improve data quality, and ensure regulatory compliance. Stewards are also responsible to make recommendations about data access, security, distribution, retention, archiving, and disposal.

Data stewardship is management and oversight of data assets to help provide data consumers with high-quality data that is easy to access and understand. Data stewards work at a tactical level to facilitate appropriate use of data and to identify issues, resolve conflicts, and prevent misunderstanding of data meaning.

Data stewardship is a common practice in data governance programs that should be leveraged to help address the resource constraints facing many privacy programs. Data stewards can become the eyes and ears of the privacy management program to help monitor data collection, processing, and sharing. If the stewards are trained well, they can identify privacy issues and risks for the privacy program and assist in mitigation efforts.