Data stewards are responsible for the quality of data in managed collections within InterAction, especially during the early stages of data cleanup. As data quality improves, data stewards can move on to data outside managed collections. Managed collections are groups of similar contacts that are important to the organization and should therefore have complete, accurate, and well-formatted data recorded. Typically, these correspond to contact types such as Clients, Prospects, or Our Personnel.
Contact types are used to categorize contacts and are visible to Web Client users. Contact types can also be used to manage changes users make to contact information.
Data stewards may also be responsible for profiling contacts within each of the contact types. A profile includes the information about a contact within the context of the contact type. For example, InterAction provides additional fields to profile clients and employees. Users can access this profile information from both the Web Client and the Windows Client.
The data steward also has the authority to approve or reject any contacts added to the collection. For example, you can set up rules that allow the data steward to review contacts that users have specified as Prospects.
Finally, the data steward has the authority to approve or reject any changes that users make to contact information for contacts within the collection. For example, if a user changes the business address for a Client, the change can be submitted to a data steward for approval.
Consider this scenario - InterAction includes a Prospects contact type. Professional users and others can apply this contact type to contacts which adds the contacts to the collection of Prospects. However, the data steward might still have to do the following after the contact is added to the collection:
- Review the new contact and make sure the information provided is complete.
- Decide whether the contact really should be part of the collection.
- Fill in any relevant additional fields for the contact. To do this, the data steward may need to ask the person who added the contact for details or perform research to validate the data.
An approval process like this one is not a requirement and may not be necessary for every collection. In some cases, the data steward may just review the contacts for completeness rather than approve them. Other collections, such as Colleges and Universities, may not even require the data steward to review the contacts.
The data steward must be willing and able to invest the time to review and maintain the data for each collection of contacts that have a contact type applied for which they are responsible. Note that the data steward is not necessarily the only source for new contacts in the collection; he or she primarily reviews data provided by other users.
You can set the level of control a data steward has over a particular managed collection based on the following:
- The importance of the collection
- Your tolerance for poor data in the collection
- The amount of data quality resources you wish to apply to the collection
What Are 'Data Stewards?'
This guide uses the term “data steward” to refer to the role of maintaining data quality. This is not necessarily a job title, nor a full-time job. Depending on your organization’s needs, you may have one or more people who perform this function full-time, such as data administrators or data quality specialists. If your organization does not have the need for a dedicated staff, the data steward function may be just one of many responsibilities assigned to a particular person or group.
What Are Managed Collections?
Managed Collections are lists of contacts for which you want to manage the changes users make. Managed collections typically are assigned contact types. For example, Clients, Prospects, and Our Personnel are all collections of contacts for which you want to manage changes users make. These are all contact types provided out of the box with InterAction.
Typically, as a part of managing a collection, you use InterAction features to set up a submission or review process for the following user requests:
- Adding contacts to the collection
- Removing contacts from the collection
- Changing contact information for contacts within the collection
In addition, the contacts that are in managed collections are typically your organization’s most important contacts and therefore should be fully profiled.