"Defining what 'Active Customer' officially means for business reporting."
Who has primary accountability and ownership for executing or signing off on this task?
Great job, Alex!
Here is your Data Governance Ownership maturity breakdown:
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About this simulator
"Who Owns This?" is a free, ten-scenario simulator about the argument every data governance program eventually has: when something goes wrong with a dataset, whose job was it? Each scenario describes a concrete task — a metric definition changes, a pipeline drops rows, a retention rule needs enforcing — and asks you to assign it to the Business Owner, the Data Steward / Product Owner, or the IT / Data Team.
The three roles are drawn from the DAMA data governance framework and are easy to state and hard to apply. The Business Owner holds domain definitions, business rules, revenue metrics, and final risk sign-off. The Data Steward / Product Owner maintains data hygiene, quality profiling, catalog metadata, and the rules that cross departments. The IT / Data Team executes the pipelines, storage, hosting, security, and backups. Most real disputes happen because a task looks like it belongs to whoever noticed it first.
The exercise takes about three minutes and needs no account. It is deliberately RACI-shaped: the question is not who does the work but who is accountable for the outcome — which is the distinction that ends turf wars rather than restarting them.
What you practice
- Separating accountability from execution — the person who runs the job is often not the person answerable for it.
- Business ownership of definitions — why "what counts as an active customer" is never an IT decision.
- Stewardship across departments — who arbitrates when two domains disagree about the same field.
- The limits of the IT mandate — infrastructure, security, and pipelines, not business meaning.
- Escalation paths — recognizing the small set of decisions that genuinely need a sign-off rather than a fix.
Questions about this simulator
What is the difference between a data owner and a data steward?
The data owner is accountable: they decide what the data means, approve its business rules, and sign off on the risk of using it. The data steward is responsible for keeping it fit for use day to day — profiling quality, maintaining the glossary and catalog entries, and reconciling rules that span departments. Ownership is a decision right; stewardship is an ongoing job.
Where does IT fit in data ownership?
IT owns the execution layer: pipelines, storage, infrastructure, access control, and backups. It does not own business meaning. When a metric is wrong because its definition is wrong, that is an ownership question, not an engineering ticket — which is exactly the confusion this simulator is built around.
Do I need a formal RACI matrix before I start?
No. The simulator works as a way to discover what your implicit RACI already is. Teams often run it together and find they disagree on scenarios they assumed were settled, which is usually more useful than the score.
Is it free?
Yes. There is no account and no email capture. The ten scenarios are scored entirely in your browser; the only thing that leaves it is the leaderboard entry, and only if you press Publish — the display name you typed, your final score and how long you took to answer then appear on the same global board every other player sees.