Data Steward's Role in Data Administration:

The University of Arizona is home to many different information systems, each with its own set of features, limitations, accounts, interfaces, and of course, each with its own data. While many of these systems function independently of each other, they are all, to greater or lesser extents, interdependent components of the university community inasmuch as we ourselves are interdependent. It is through this interdependence that the Data Stewards Council was formed to coordinate the exchange of data across information systems and communicate with other members of the community the current state, evolution, and fate of those systems. The council is also charged with setting and maintaining the general access policies for the campus, and with the general task of data administration for the campus, including educating the user community on institutional data policies, encouraging the responsible use of institutional data, and ensuring that transactional data from each system are made available to the University's Data Warehouses.

It is the responsibility of each Data Steward on the council to act as the primary contact for issues related to the data resident in her or his information system. Broadly speaking, the Data Steward controls access to the system by managing and enforcing consistent access policies, and administers the data in the appropriate information system.

The responsibility of Data Administration assures a particular information system is reliable, accurate, secure, and has well-defined data to support strategic planning and decision making at all levels of the enterprise.