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Data Roles

There are many Data roles across an organisation that touch, manage or use Data, thus it’s important for us to define these roles and how they interact with the Data Lifecycle. These roles have been broken down into two major groups:

  • Data Management Roles
  • Data Usage or Consumer Roles

Data Management Roles​

People that are actively part of the creation, preparation and management of Data within the Lifecycle. These roles are responsible for Data Governance across the Organisation.

Functional Flows

Data Owner​

This is a business person who sets the strategy and has approved financial authority for decision making about Data within their domain. The Data Owner is the head of function that produces / creates the data.
Please note that this label can vary between organisations (some would call them General managers or Vice Presidents). Ultimately, it’s the decision maker within that function that controls the approval of funding.

In CryspIQ, whilst adding a source message, the Business Function field is needs to be entered. In doing so, this directly assigns the ownership of the source Data to that business function.

Data Stewards​

These are Business Professionals who are recognised as the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) within their data domain. The Data Steward normally works within the business function and is considered to have a deep understanding of the Data. They work with stakeholders to Define and Improve the Data across their organisation.

In CryspIQ, whilst adding a source message, the Data Steward name and email address is added. In doing so, this directly assigns the responsibility for the quality of the Data being created / produced.

Technical Stewards​

These are Technical Professionals who operate within one of the technical knowledge areas (Data Engineer, Data Integration Specialist, Database Administrator, Data Modeller, Data Architects, Metadata Analyst, Data Operations Specialists etc) for the Data. This includes the external Data Providers or Data Producers. Normally the application / system in which the Data resides and work under the direction of the Data Steward.
They support the Data Stewards by doing the day to day work.

In CryspIQ, this role is not assigned, but they will be assigned the work by the Data Steward.

Usage Roles​

These are the roles that find and use Data using different analytical techniques to find insights for your Business. Some of these roles build automatic algorithms that create new Data based off their insights / predictive and AI models.

Analysts​

Data Analysts are people who use Data for Descriptive analytical purposes. Most business users or consumers will fall into this category. Descriptive analytics is the simplest form of data analysis and its goal is to answer the question "What happened?".

Specialists​

Specialist Analysts are people who use Data for Diagnostic analytical purposes. This includes your BI Specialists, Power BI specialists, Tableau Specialists, QlikView Specialists and Report Builders. Diagnostic analytics aims to identify the reasons behind past events or performances and its goal is to answer the question "Why did it happen?". This specialist role may create new algorithms, which need to be productionised that creates new Data which feeds back into the Lifecycle.

Data Scientists​

Data Scientists are people who use Data for Predictive and Prescriptive analytical purposes. Scientist or Machine Learning Specialists fall into the category. Predictive analytics is aims to use historical data, statistical algorithms and machine learning techniques to make predictions and answer the question "What is likely to happen?". Prescriptive analytics is the most advanced type of analytics and provides scenario recommendations to answer the question "What should we do?". This very specialised role will create models that can be productionised to create new Data which will feed back into the Lifecycle.