The answer to the challenges concerning data ownership and governance,  is that data needs to be actively and efficiently managed.

Formal enterprise-wide Data Stewardship, as part of a Data Governance effort, is crucial in managing data and achieving solutions to these challenges. With Data Stewardship, the organisation can begin treating data as an asset. Like other assets, the data needs to be inventoried, owned, used wisely, and understood. This requires different techniques with data than with physical assets, but the need is the same. With the data asset, inventorying and understanding the data takes the form of a formally published business glossary, often in conjunction with a metadata repository.

Establishing ownership requires understanding how the data is collected and who uses it, then determining who can best be responsible for the content and quality of the data elements. Finally, ensuring that data is used wisely means understanding and managing how the data is created, for what purpose the data was created, and whether it is suitable for use in new situations that may arise—or even in the situations for which the data is being used currently.