If you spend your days working in data governance, you have this conversation over and over. It always ends at the same big question: who should actually own the data?

The moment the room goes quiet

Picture the meeting. Things are moving along nicely until someone asks who owns a particular set of numbers. In some organisations hands shoot up and people volunteer for rather more than they should. Far more often the room goes quiet, everyone suddenly finds something interesting to look at on the table, and after a long pause someone offers the escape hatch that comes up almost every single time. Can IT just own it? It is data, after all.

It is an understandable suggestion. IT runs the systems, builds the integrations, and fixes things when they break. But that is exactly where the misunderstanding begins.

The real problem is not technical

When nobody clearly owns the data, chaos creeps in. Not technical chaos, but accountability chaos. The symptoms will be familiar to almost any organisation. The same key figure gets defined two different ways in two different reports. Data quality slips, and no one feels responsible for putting it right. Decisions drag, because no one is willing to stand behind the numbers. And the question of who approved this goes round and round the table without ever landing on a name.

None of that is a technology failure. It is a failure of ownership.

What a Data Owner actually does?

Here is the part that surprises people. A Data Owner is not a technical role. It is a business role. The person who owns a set of data is responsible for four things.

First, the meaning. What does this number actually represent, how is it calculated, and who gets to decide? Second, the rules of access. Who should be able to see which data, and under what conditions? Third, approval. No figure should be used to make a decision unless someone has signed off that it is fit for the job. And fourth, value. Data is never the goal in itself. It is a means to better decisions, and the owner keeps that link alive.

Put simply, ownership creates clarity.

Why IT is not the answer

When someone suggests that IT should own the data, it is usually because IT is the team that handles it in a technical sense. But look at who actually lives with it. It is the business that uses the data in day to day work, the business that makes decisions on the back of it, and the business that carries the consequences when it turns out to be wrong.

Data is a business asset. That is why the business has to own it. Not IT, not the BI team, but the specific business unit that depends on those numbers to do its job.

This is usually the moment something shifts in the room. A short silence, then a smile, a nod, and the quiet click of everything falling into place.

What clear ownership gives you

Once real Data Owners are in place, the change is easy to see. Reporting becomes more reliable, because someone is genuinely accountable for its quality. The processes around collecting, approving, and using data get clearer. The business and IT start working together far better, because everyone finally knows who does what. And decisions get faster and more confident, because no one has to stop and wonder whether the numbers can be trusted.

How to start

The good news is that putting data ownership in place does not need to begin as a huge programme. Start small. Identify the handful of data that matters most to your business, then find the people who truly live and breathe those numbers. Hand them the ownership, and let the rest follow. That is where it begins.

Get started

This is the work we do at Avito. We help leadership teams put clear ownership around their most important data, so that Data Management and Data Governance become a matter of accountability rather than guesswork.

If your organisation keeps circling the same question of who owns the numbers, that is exactly where we can help you start. We would be glad to have that first conversation, feel free to get in touch for an informal conversation.