Data governance – Part 7: Operating model for responsible data stewardship

The role of data stewardship has become a central issue in the evolution of modern markets, politics, and nearly every other aspect of public life. As a result, there is a significant amount of emergent opportunity, risk, and instability posed by competing efforts to define data stewardship as a practice – both in terms of its core functions and ethical standards. In the absence of consensus approaches to data stewardship standards, a range of governments and enterprises are, largely unilaterally, inventing their own practice – often in ways that project or benefit their competitive, political, or moral interests. These competing efforts are at the root of a number of civil and economic, though increasingly military, conflicts – splintering access to services and the physical infrastructure of the digital world. Government and industry continue to support the strategic need for the standards as it offers an uncommon opportunity to debate and build consensus around the functional and ethical standards for data stewardship, not as an imperative for innovation – but rooted in an immediate need for critical infrastructure to stabilize current practice.