Data Owner vs. Data Steward: What’s the Difference?
Actian Corporation
June 9, 2025
Companies rely on data to make strategic decisions, improve operations, and drive innovation. However, with the growing volume and complexity of data, managing and maintaining its integrity, accessibility, and security has become a major challenge.
This is where the roles of data owners and data stewards come into play. Both are essential in the realm of data governance, but their responsibilities, focus areas, and tasks differ. Understanding the distinction between data owner vs. data steward is crucial for developing a strong data governance framework.
This article explores the differences between data owners and data stewards. It explains the importance of both roles in effective data management and shares how Actian can help both data owners and data stewards collaborate and manage data governance more efficiently.
What is a Data Owner?
A data owner is the individual or team within an organization who is ultimately responsible for a specific set of data. The data owner is typically a senior leader, department head, or business unit leader who has the authority over data within their domain.
Data owners are accountable for the data’s security, compliance, and overall business value. They are responsible for ensuring that data is used appropriately, securely, and per organizational policies and regulations.
Key responsibilities of a data owner include:
- Accountability for Data Security: Data owners are responsible for ensuring that data is protected and secure. This includes managing access permissions, ensuring compliance with data protection regulations such as GDPR or HIPAA, and working with IT teams to prevent data breaches.
- Defining Data Usage: Data owners determine how their data should be used within the organization. They help define the policies and rules that govern how data is accessed and shared, ensuring that data serves business needs without exposing the organization to risk.
- Compliance and Regulatory Requirements: Data owners must ensure that their data complies with relevant regulations and industry standards. They oversee audits and ensure that proper documentation and controls are in place to meet compliance requirements.
- Data Strategy Alignment: Data owners work closely with organizational leadership to ensure that the data aligns with broader business strategies and goals. They ensure that data is properly utilized to drive business growth, innovation, and decision-making.
- Data Access Control: Data owners have the authority to define who can access their data. They set up permissions and manage user roles to ensure that only authorized individuals can access sensitive or critical data.
What is a Data Steward?
While the data owner holds the ultimate responsibility for the data, the data steward is the individual who takes a more operational role in managing, maintaining, and improving data quality. Data stewards typically handle the day-to-day management and governance of data, ensuring that it’s accurate, complete, and properly classified.
They act as the custodian of data within the organization, working closely with data owners and other stakeholders to ensure that data is used effectively across different teams and departments.
Key responsibilities of a data steward include:
- Data Quality Management: Data stewards play a critical role in maintaining data quality. They are responsible for ensuring that data is accurate, complete, consistent, and up to date. This involves implementing data validation rules, monitoring data integrity, and addressing data quality issues as they arise.
- Metadata Management: Data stewards manage the metadata associated with data. This includes defining data definitions, data types, and relationships between datasets and data assets. By organizing and maintaining metadata, data stewards ensure that data can be easily understood and accessed by anyone in the organization who needs it.
- Data Classification and Standardization: Data stewards are involved in classifying data, tagging it with relevant metadata, and establishing data standards. This helps ensure that data is consistent, well-organized, and easily searchable.
- Collaboration with Data Users: Data stewards often work closely with data users, such as analysts, data scientists, and business units, to understand their needs and provide them with the appropriate resources. They help ensure that data is accessible, usable, and meets the specific needs of different departments.
- Data Lineage and Documentation: Data stewards maintain records of data lineage, which track the flow and transformation of data from its source to its destination. This helps ensure traceability and transparency, allowing users to understand where data comes from and how it has been modified over time.
Data Owner vs. Data Steward: Key Differences
While both data owners and data stewards are essential to effective data governance, their roles differ in terms of focus, responsibilities, and authority. Below is a comparison of data owner vs. data steward roles to highlight their distinctions:
| Data Owner | Data Steward | |
| Primary Responsibility | Overall accountability for data governance and security. | Day-to-day management, quality, and integrity of data. |
| Focus | Strategic alignment, compliance, data usage, and access control. | Operational focus on data quality, metadata management, and classification. |
| Authority | Holds decision-making power on how data is used and shared. | Executes policies and guidelines set by data owners, ensures data quality. |
| Collaboration | Works with senior leadership, IT, legal, and compliance teams. | Works with data users, IT teams, and data owners to maintain data quality. |
| Scope | Oversees entire datasets or data domains. | Focuses on the practical management and stewardship of data within domains. |
Why Both Roles are Essential in Data Governance
Data owners and data stewards play complementary roles in maintaining a strong data governance framework. The success of data governance depends on a clear division of responsibilities between these roles:
- Data owners provide strategic direction, ensuring that data aligns with business goals, complies with regulations, and is properly secured.
- Data stewards ensure that the data is usable, accurate, and accessible on a daily basis, helping to operationalize the governance policies set by the data owners.
Together, they create a balance between high-level oversight and hands-on data management. This ensures that data is not only protected and compliant but also accessible, accurate, and valuable for the organization.
How Actian Supports Data Owners and Data Stewards
Actian offers a powerful data governance platform designed to support both data owners and data stewards in managing their responsibilities effectively. It provides tools that empower both roles to maintain high-quality, compliant, and accessible data while streamlining collaboration between these key stakeholders.
Here are six ways the Actian Data Intelligence Platform supports data owners and data stewards:
1. Centralized Data Governance
The centralized platform enables data owners and data stewards to manage their responsibilities in one place. Data owners can set governance policies, define data access controls, and ensure compliance with relevant regulations. Meanwhile, data stewards can monitor data quality, manage metadata, and collaborate with data users to maintain the integrity of data.
2. Data Lineage and Traceability
Data stewards can use the platform to track data lineage, providing a visual representation of how data flows through the organization. This transparency helps data stewards understand where data originates, how it’s transformed, and where it’s used, which is essential for maintaining data quality and ensuring compliance. Data owners can also leverage this lineage information to assess risk and ensure that data usage complies with business policies.
3. Metadata Management
Metadata management capabilities embedded in the platform allow data stewards to organize, manage, and update metadata across datasets. This ensures that data is well-defined and easily accessible for users. Data owners can use metadata to establish data standards and governance policies, ensuring consistency across the organization.
4. Automated Data Quality Monitoring
Data stewards can use the Actian Data Intelligence Platform to automate data quality checks, ensuring that data is accurate, consistent, and complete. By automating data quality monitoring, the platform reduces the manual effort required from data stewards and ensures that data remains high-quality at all times. Data owners can rely on these automated checks to assess the overall health of their data governance efforts.
5. Collaboration Tools
The platform fosters collaboration between data owners, data stewards, and other stakeholders through user-friendly tools. Both data owners and stewards can share insights, discuss data-related issues, and work together to address data governance challenges. This collaboration ensures that data governance policies are effectively implemented, and data is managed properly.
6. Compliance and Security
Data owners can leverage the platform to define access controls, monitor data usage, and ensure that data complies with industry regulations. Data stewards can use the platform to enforce these policies and maintain the security and integrity of data.
Data Owners and Stewards Can Tour the Platform to Experience Its Capabilities
Understanding the roles of data owner vs. data steward is crucial for establishing an effective data governance strategy. Data owners are responsible for the strategic oversight of data, ensuring its security, compliance, and alignment with business goals, while data stewards manage the day-to-day operations of data, focusing on its quality, metadata, and accessibility.
Actian supports both roles by providing a centralized platform for data governance, automated data quality monitoring, comprehensive metadata management, and collaborative tools. By enabling both data owners and data stewards to manage their responsibilities effectively, the platform helps organizations maintain high-quality, compliant, and accessible data, which is essential for making informed, data-driven decisions.
Tour the Actian Data Intelligence Platform or schedule a personalized demonstration of its capabilities today.
Subscribe to the Actian Blog
Subscribe to Actian’s blog to get data insights delivered right to you.
- Stay in the know – Get the latest in data analytics pushed directly to your inbox.
- Never miss a post – You’ll receive automatic email updates to let you know when new posts are live.
- It’s all up to you – Change your delivery preferences to suit your needs.