Overview

The Data Steward is the accountable owner for the trustworthiness and governed use of all data in Esri’s Customer Data Platform (CDP). This role owns the platform’s data model, metadata, identity rules, data quality, and data-usage policy, ensuring that customer and marketing data in CDP is accurately defined, approved before it is ingested, continuously monitored for quality, and used only in accordance with Esri’s data governance, privacy, and access standards.

The Data Steward is a member of a team who ensure the Customer Data Platform can deliver on key business use cases. They partner most closely with the Business Analyst, platform team, and data developers. Within that team, the Data Steward holds approval authority over schemas, new datasets and sources, data-usage labels, and dataset and audience access policy. The role works closely with marketing stakeholders, Enterprise Architecture, and Esri’s privacy function to keep the CDP aligned with the enterprise data model and governed enterprise data priorities.

The goal of our Data Steward is simple: ensure that every data asset in the customer data platform (CDP) - schemas, identities, datasets, audiences, and the definitions behind them - is accountable, understood, trusted, protected, and findable, so the business can activate customer data with confidence.

Responsibilities

Data Model and Metadata

Own the CDP Data Model schema set, field groups, identity namespaces, and the CDP data dictionary, ensuring every ingested field has an authoritative business definition, owner, and classification
Maintain business definitions, metadata, data classifications, taxonomies, reference data documentation, and decision logs in CDP and in approved enterprise governance tools
Document relationships among CDP schemas, source systems, identity graph, profiles, audiences, and downstream destinations, including data lineage and control points
Approve all schema changes and taxonomy changes and maintain the documentation required to implement them
Model data within the CDP based on business use cases to deliver key capabilities

Source and Dataset Governance

Review and approve every new data source and dataset before ingestion into CDP, including its business purpose, attributes, mapping rules, data classification, and intended use
Define attribute mappings, identity rules, matching criteria, and merge policies, and provide the specifications the Data Developer implements in ingestion pipelines
Review identity resolution and profile merge results to confirm records resolve correctly and that the identity graph is not over- or under-merging customer profiles

Data Quality and Integrity

Perform routine data profiling, comparison, validation, and quality review activities to identify missing, incomplete, duplicate, inconsistent, invalid, or improperly classified data in CDP
Own de-duplication, merge policy, and hierarchy management for customer and account data in CDP
Investigate data quality issues through root-cause analysis across source systems, ingestion pipelines, and the identity graph; document findings and drive corrective and preventive actions with data owners, the Data Developer, and system owners
Define data quality rules and acceptance criteria that govern the validation of datasets, schema changes, and audiences before activation
Publish recurring data quality metrics, exception reports, and stewardship dashboards for CDP

Data Usage, Access, and Privacy

Apply and enforce CDP data-usage labels and governance policies and classify sensitive and personal data elements
Serve as the approval authority for which teams, audiences, and destinations may consume which datasets, and define the access model the Application Administrator executes
Partner with the Privacy team to ensure consent, data-subject rights, retention, and regulatory requirements (such as GDPR and CCPA) are reflected in CDP data handling, and engage privacy review when new sources, new destinations, or changes involving personal data are proposed