Manage Data Ownership

Data ownership refers to the explicit assignment of owners to every data element in the taxonomy. Data owners are either individuals or teams who make decisions such as who has the right to access and edit data and how it’s used. Owners may not work with their data every day, but are responsible for overseeing and protecting a data domain.

In the context of the GDPR, data owners are accountable for the quality, integrity, and protection of their data space.

Data owners can be directly in charge of remediating issues with data, or delegate those tasks to data stewards. Data stewards work with data on a daily basis, ensuring that it’s accurate, de-duplicated, and consolidated to a single version of truth.

The term “data ownership” is often confused with legal data ownership, which, as established by the GDPR, remains with the data subject. However, the context of data ownership in this article is within the organization and ownership refers to accountability.