Data steward
Data stewards are the heart of data governance. This role is responsible for interpreting regulations, contractual restrictions, and policies, and applying them directly to the data. Informed by their understanding of these regulations, restrictions, and policies, the role of a data steward includes:
- Reviewing data, datasets, and data samples to apply and manage metadata usage labeling.
- Creating data policies and applying them to datasets and fields.
- Communicating data policies to the organization.
Marketer
Marketers are the end point of data governance. They request data from the data governance infrastructure created by data stewards, scientists, and engineers. Marketers encompass a number of different specialties under the marketing umbrella, including the following:
- Marketing Analysts request data to enable understanding of customers, both as individuals and in groups (also known as segments).
- Marketing Specialists and Experience Designers use data to design new customer experiences.
Data Governance framework
The Data Governance framework simplifies and streamlines the process of categorizing data and creating data usage policies. Once data labels have been applied and data usage policies are in place, marketing actions can be evaluated to ensure the correct use of data.
There are three key elements to the Data Governance framework: Labels, Policies, and Enforcement.
- Labels: Classify data that reflects privacy-related considerations and contractual conditions to be compliant with regulations and organization policies.
- Policies: Describe what kinds of marketing actions are allowed or not allowed to be taken on specific data.
- Enforcement: Uses the policy framework to advise and enforce policies across different data access patterns.
Data usage labels
Data Governance enables data stewards to apply usage labels at the schema field level to categorize data according to the type of policies that apply.
The Data Governance framework includes predefined data usage labels that can be used to categorize data in three ways:
- Contract “C” Data Labels: Label and categorize data that has contractual obligations or is related to customer data governance policies.
- Identity “I” Data Labels: Label and categorize data that can identify or contact a specific person.
- Sensitive “S” Data Labels: Label and categorize data related to sensitive data such as geographic data.
Labels can be applied at any time, providing flexibility in how you choose to govern data. Best practice encourages labeling data when it is ingested into Experience Platform, or as soon as data becomes available in Platform.
See the overview on data usage labels for more information on how data usage labels are used to help enforce data governance compliance.
Data usage policies
For data usage labels to effectively support data compliance, data usage policies must be implemented. Data usage policies are rules that describe the kinds of marketing actions that you are allowed to, or restricted from, performing on data within Experience Platform.
An example of a marketing action might be the desire to export a dataset to a third-party service. If there is a policy in place declaring that Personally Identifiable Information (PII) cannot be exported, and an “I” label (identity data) has been applied to the field level from its schema. Policy Service then prevents any action that would export this dataset to a third-party destination. Should one of these action attempts occur, Policy Service sends a message telling you that a data usage policy has been violated.
There are two types of policies available:
- Data governance policy: Restrict data activation based on the marketing action being performed and the data usage labels carried by the data in question.
- Consent policy: Filter the profiles that can be activated to destinations based on your customers’ consent or preferences.
Once data usage labels have been applied, data stewards can create policies using the Policy Service API or the Experience Platform user interface. For more information on data usage policies and marketing actions, see the policies overview.