Steward Accountability
Making stewardship a defined role with time, authority and consequences, rather than a title added to somebody's existing job.
Data stewardship fails in a consistent way. Stewards are nominated across the business, given a title and a quarterly forum, no allocated time, no authority to decide anything, and no consequence for a dataset in their name being wrong. The programme is reported as established and nothing changes.
What makes the role real is unromantic. Allocated time, named as a proportion of the role rather than assumed to fit around it. Authority to decide the definition and approve access for their domain, so requests do not route past them. Consequences, which usually means their datasets' quality and freshness appear on a dashboard their manager sees.
The scope has to be bounded to be doable: a steward owns specific datasets or specific terms, not "data quality in the finance function".
The escalation path is the part most often missing. A steward who cannot resolve a cross-domain disagreement — two domains defining "customer" incompatibly — needs somewhere to take it that will decide. Without that, disagreements persist indefinitely and the steward's authority is theoretical, which the organisation learns quickly.