Comments on: Stewardship

By: Jon Lebkowsky

Jon Lebkowsky — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 12:54:01 +0000

Seth, I agree about the critical role of information stewardship and/or curation, and I appreciate the pointer to your slides – looking now at the definition you have of information stewardship as “willingness to be accountable for a set of business information for the well-being of the larger organization, by operating in service of (rather than under control of) those around us. ” Noting the relationship to information quality and process improvement. “Common understanding” is hard to achieve – I’ve been thinking how communication is making your ideas real inside somebody else’s head. Orchestrating a common understanding in many heads can be difficult, given inherent internal variations.

Jay: I agree about parenting, and I am a parent and grandparent. Also totally agree that you can’t tell a community how to be a community – and you can’t create it or own it, it’s more a mattter of nurturing.

By: Jay Grady

Jay Grady — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 01:30:31 +0000

Jon,

As a loving and devoted father of two, I beleive you just unknowingly described what it’s like being a parent. (I have no idea if you are, or are not, a parent).

Stewardship – 2 : the conducting, supervising, or managing of something; especially : the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one’s care

Reading the Merriam-Webster definition above is in many ways what I view as my role as a “Dad” – to provide an unselfish stewardship of two human beings that are learning, changing, adapting, and questioning at all times. This is a complicated endeavor that involves a wide range of complex interactions and a near constant dismissal of one’s “self” for the sake of the greater good.

Very early on I understood and consequently gave up the idea that I could “tell” my children how to live. Certainly my guidance and, ahem, coaching emerge as words spoken softly, loudly, and at times in a way that resembles a screaming banshee. But in the end my *actions* and my *behavior* will demonstrate my true self and provide the guidance my children need.

Ultimately one can only control one’s self. As my children grow and become adults, I’ll speak to them as adults (hopefully) and understand how my actions influenced their outcomes.

Influence shares a similar defintion as stewardship. Both aptly describe being a Dad. You cannot “tell” a community how to be a community no more than you can “tell” a child how to be an adult. You can only live it, and thus demonstrate to others how to be the only thing you can be – your “self”.

Jay

By: Seth Johnson

Seth Johnson — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 18:08:15 +0000

We’re going to need information stewardship to make technology work. Standard tenet of information quality. Key fact: computers don’t make information accurate, people do. I theorize that the role of frontline information producer (who can have the responsibility for accuracy, timeliness, completeness, etc.) will become core to the new economy. Information quality depends on a lot of things, but chiefly a culture of information stewardship, which requires common understanding through shared metadata. You might find my presentation on enterprise-scale information stewardship via metadata for a health care context interesting: http://www.slideshare.net/Differance/information-quality-and-metadata-in-healthcare-management
A lot of that is rooted in the work of Larry English.