Introducing Steward: The First Issue Tracker for Data

Do you have a data quality process that actually works well?

We’ve heard, “no”, almost unanimously across enterprises. Most often, data quality issues get raised through a process that looks like this:

These sorts of emails provide little to no context about the issue, requiring the recipient (me in this case) to spend 15 minutes to first recall what “Analytic 1” entails and then spend 30+ minutes more in software and emails trying to identify the issue.

I ultimately gave up and requested a screenshare to have Megan walk me through the issue so that I could finally get to fixing the underlying data. This adds unnecessary days to the overall resolution process, delaying when Megan can start using this data to grow her business.

Current data quality processes are broken. We’re building Steward to change that.

Steward gives you the context you need to efficiently resolve data quality issues

At Tamr, we’re obsessed with helping our customers get trusted, up-to-date, unified data that they can use to deliver big outcomes. We’re building Steward to eliminate the friction between data consumers and their counterparts responsible for sourcing and preparing data.

Our goal is to decrease the time required to resolve a data quality issue from days to minutes. We’re excited to announce our first major milestone on this journey — launching a Tableau plug-in within the Tableau Extension Gallery.

The Extension is the first of many Steward plug-ins we’re planning to release for common enterprise data tools. It gives Tableau users the tools required to seamlessly capture data quality issues and collaboratively resolve them. Here’s how it can help you improve the quality of your data.

Report issues from within Tableau and automatically capture metadata critical to resolving the issue

After you download the extension, you can simply drop it into any Tableau dashboard using the extensions feature. A “Give Feedback” button will appear on the dashboard that viewers can select at any time to raise data quality issues. That’s it! Less than two minutes is all you need to empower dashboard viewers to raise data quality issues.

Collaborate on issues from a single place to get everyone on the same page

Steward is the primary place where teams can collaborate on data issues. No more email silos hindering your team’s ability to contribute their insight, understand current issues, and learn from previous solutions. No more repurposing of heavy-weight tools like Jira to track data issues and initiatives. Steward is designed specifically for data, and the tool gives your team what you need to bring in the right people at the right time to track the entire discussion around a problem.

Stay on top of the sources of issues and where to focus your energy

Teams that adopt Steward broadly for tracking and resolving data issues benefit by being able to understand the precise data sources, dashboards, and pieces of data creating challenges. This allows teams to be more proactive and data-driven in terms of prioritizing issues based on urgency and impact – whether it’s a one-off fix of an erroneous sales figure for a dashboard going to the CEO or a bigger change such as cleaning up your customer master list.