Master Data Governance in Practice — The Modern Master Data Center

It is very common for us to start MDM projects at clients where the Master Data Center still works as an operational island. Requests arrive by email, spreadsheets, WhatsApp or tickets. Knowledge of the rules is concentrated in a few people within that area. Business areas do not know exactly who decides what. And, when a relevant master data error occurs, tracing its origin and preventing it from happening again are far out of reach — basically, only the specific error is fixed.

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The scenario above is a classic case — not necessarily because there is no MDM tool, but because of the lack of definition of the Data Owner and Data Steward roles.

During our implementations, our main mission is to drive a structural change at these companies. As a result, we have seen Master Data Centers involved in virtually all strategic projects — not for the sake of the master data operation itself, but because they have become master data orchestrators, gained knowledge about the multidimensional impacts of these data, and moved from “the company depends on my individual knowledge” to “I helped build and keep alive the company's master data governance”.

But what is the relationship between this transformation and the Data Owner and Data Steward roles? Let us start with a brief definition:

In practice, Data Governance does not start with technology — it starts with clearly defined responsibilities.

According to the DAMA-DMBOK, the main worldwide reference on Data Governance, governance is the exercise of authority, control and decision-making over the organization's data assets. When we bring this into the master data universe, a fundamental question arises:

Who is really responsible for the definitions of the company's critical master data?

This is where the roles of Data Owner and Data Steward stop being theoretical concepts and become extremely practical organizational mechanisms.

The Data Owner is not the one who “operates” the data — they are the one institutionally accountable for it. The Data Steward does not replace the business; they represent the business area's knowledge for the given data domain.

A single data domain often impacts several areas of the company. That is why it is common for a domain to have multiple Data Stewards representing different business perspectives.

If the Data Owner is the owner of the domain, how do we choose them? In practice, choosing the Data Owner should rarely follow the logic of “whoever uses the data the most”. The key criterion is usually: “Who has the highest institutional capacity to assess the corporate impacts of that data domain?”

That means choosing areas that:

• understand the multidisciplinary impacts of the record;
• have organizational legitimacy;
• can arbitrate conflicts between areas;
• actively participate in the strategic processes related to the domain;
• can sustain corporate rules in the long run.

At this point, the connection between Master Data Governance and the evolution of the Master Data Center becomes clearer. In our view, classic (operational) Master Data Centers are typically the best candidate area to evolve into the Data Owner in a modern view, while key people from business areas become the best candidates for Data Steward in this model.

This shift takes the Master Data Center from an operational level to a tactical level, with meaningful strategic involvement — this is illustrated in the case below:

The vendor master lived within Finance — called the Finance Master Data Center — which received all requests via email to create/maintain the record in SAP S/4HANA. Whenever it was unclear how to define the right value for a given attribute or how to handle a specific case, they contacted whichever business areas they thought were relevant to try to solve the issue — exactly what the first diagram in this article shows.

The MDM+ BRO implementation project reorganized these responsibilities, turning the leadership of the Finance Master Data Center into the Data Owner of that domain and, at the same time, bringing the most experienced professionals from Procurement, Compliance, Tax, etc. into the Data Steward role, formally recognizing responsibilities in the process.

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Because of the high level of automation and the depth of the validation rules and exception workflows, it was possible to hand day-to-day data operation to less experienced professionals — all through controlled processes that expose only the relevant fields for each situation and with a robust data validation layer, ensuring 100% adherence to the defined governance model.

Bringing in a RACI view: while operators carry out day-to-day master data activities and Data Stewards support the definition and upkeep of rules, the Data Owner remains responsible for tactical and strategic decisions on the data domain.

The evolution from the classic Master Data Center to a Modern Master Data Center represents a change in operating model and responsibilities within companies.

Governance maturity does not increase dependence on specialists. On the contrary, when rules, approvals and validations are systematized, execution can be decentralized to less experienced profiles while keeping quality and compliance.

Organizations mature in master data stop depending on isolated areas and hyper-specialists who “do the master data” and start operating through formal structures of ownership, stewardship and shared governance — and when this happens, master data becomes a strategic asset of the organization.