Data Governance - Lead Data Steward

Nelnet Business Services (NBS), a division of Nelnet, Inc., provides payment technology, education services, and learning management solutions to education and faith-based organizations, serving more than 1,300 higher education institutions, 11,500 K-12 schools, 3,500 churches, and millions of individual students, families, and supporters across the globe. Our culture of service enables us to form long‑lasting and trusted partnerships, while our focus on creativity and innovative solutions empowers our customer communities to thrive.

As a Nelnet company, the perks at NBS go beyond our benefits package. You’re part of a community, invested in you as an individual and united by our mission to create opportunities for people where they live, learn and work.

The Lead Data Steward provides influence and direction for data management practices and reports to the Data Governance Practice Manager. This position collaborates with Data Asset, Product, Development, stakeholder groups, and domain specific subject matter experts to ensure data is accessible, trustworthy, usable, and secure.

• Play a leading role in the execution of data governance strategies.
• Lead the identification of critical data management issues.
• Conduct analysis and research data management issues to identify core challenges and determine root cause(s).
• Collaborate to identify trends, draw informed conclusions, and recommend remediation actions based on the analysis.
• Articulate data management challenges into actionable remediation tasks and define project scopes and objectives.
• Develop and maintain detailed project plans, road maps and documentation to monitor and report progress.
• Assist with task prioritization to effectively drive throughput and ensure successful delivery.
• Maintain and continuously develop a data catalog to further enrich the documentation and context for our data assets.
• Provide recommendations for new or improved data standards, business rules and policies, as well as assist in developing the program road map.
• Establish and monitor key data management and governance metrics for critical data.
• Advise on various projects and initiatives ensuring changes, impacting the quality or availability of data, are identified and managed to ensure adherence with standards.
• Drive organizational acceptance of data and process standards, policies, and definitions for critical / related enterprise data.
• Build strong relationships and work collaboratively to translate data challenges into engineering requirements.
• Maintain Data Steward Council as a working group to communicate strategic initiatives and maintain consistency of critical enterprise, operational and analytical data.
• Promote data governance across the organization by facilitating presentations and workshops, as well as advising relevant stakeholders on data governance related matters with a focus on business use of data.

$90,000 - $130,000

• Bachelor’s Degree in Business, Technology or Computer Science, preferred
• Certification(s) or designation(s) in data governance or data management disciplines, preferred.

• 5+ years of experience in data management disciplines, or equivalent combination of education & experience.
• Experience developing and maintaining a data catalog, a plus.
• Experience leading collaboration efforts to improve production or master data, product information management, product documentation, or similar.

• Excellent communication skills (verbal, written and visual), with the ability to explain complex issues concisely, persuade others, and foster lasting partnerships with colleagues and management.
• Functional understanding of data governance, specifically stewardship.
• Excellent planning, organization, execution, and task management skills.
• Ability to conduct effective root‑cause analysis on identified problems.
• Operational familiarity in the use of data catalogs, metadata management, data quality, master data management, and/or data stewardship tools and platforms
• Strong analytical skills including Excel workbook manipulation.
• SQL or similar coding skills, preferred.
• Broad business acumen and…