Senior Director, Data Governance and Stewardship

Senior Director, Data Governance and Stewardship Overview

The Senior Director, Data Governance and Stewardship leads the enterprise-wide evolution of how Cook Medical understands, owns and acts on its data. This role provides strategic leadership for data governance across Cook's enterprise platforms – spanning traditional systems including ERP, CRM, and reporting environments – as well as Palantir Foundry, Cook's ontology-driven intelligence and agentic AI layer. The role partners with business leaders to ensure data is consistently defined, business‑owned and governed to a common standard across all platforms, while partnering closely with IT and AI on technical implementation to ensure the proper infrastructure is in place.

Data Governance Strategy & Operating Model

• Evolve and advance Cook Medical's enterprise data governance framework, operating model, and policy standards to keep pace with the organization's growing data and AI ambitions.
• Strengthen the Data Governance Councils with cross‑functional executive representation; serve as chair or co‑chair alongside a senior business sponsor.
• Maintain and advance a data governance roadmap that prioritizes domains based on business impact, maximizing business value, managing regulatory exposure, reducing risk, and enabling AI/agentic use case readiness.
• Define and refine governance policies, standards, and processes covering data ownership, stewardship, quality, classification, definitions, and lifecycle management.

Business Data Ownership & Stewardship

• Formalize and expand Data Owner assignments across Cook's critical data domains (e.g., Customer, Product, Supplier, Financial, Regulatory/Clinical, Employee).
• Enable and grow the network of Business Data Stewards embedded within functional areas; refine roles, accountabilities, and operating rhythms to improve engagement and effectiveness.
• Maintain and expand the Business Glossary and enterprise data dictionary, ensuring shared, unambiguous definitions across business units, systems, and geographies.
• Ensure data ownership is embedded in business processes – not just org charts – with owners actively participating in quality remediation, definition management, and governance decisions.

Data Literacy & Change Management

• Partner with HR, Learning and Talent Development to support a multi‑year literacy program building foundational Data/AI fluency across Cook's business functions, from frontline users to senior leadership.
• Champion the organizational shift from "IT/AI owns data" to "the business owns data, IT/AI enables it."
• Measure and report governance adoption metrics; identify where additional investment, enablement, or escalation is needed.
• Serve as an internal advocate – positioning data governance as a business enabler, not a compliance burden.

Master Data Management (Business Process Ownership)

• Partner with IT, data engineering and AI to advance Cook's MDM program, providing business‑side requirements, ownership assignments, and quality standards for master data entities.
• Lead the definition of MDM domains and canonical entities, establishing golden record standards for customer, product, supplier, and related data objects while aligning business stakeholders to governance definitions.
• Oversee the business processes that create, maintain, and retire master data; identify workflow gaps that introduce quality issues and drive process improvement.
• Ensure MDM standards are applied consistently across both traditional enterprise platforms and Palantir Foundry.

Cross-Platform Data Governance

• Establish and enforce consistent governance standards spanning Cook's traditional enterprise platforms and Palantir Foundry – ensuring data definitions, quality standards, ownership assignments, and access policies are coherent across environments.
• Serve as the business‑side governance authority for Cook's Palantir Foundry ontology, ensuring objects, properties, and relationships reflect business‑owned definitions through a formal review and approval process.
• Partner with IT/AI architecture, data engineering, and the Palantir program team to ensure governance is designed into platform decisions, not retrofitted…