Business Data Steward

Role Summary:
The Business Data Steward is the bridge between the technical build and the business, resolving ambiguous or conflicting customer records, validating data against real-world business knowledge, and triaging UAT defects.

Key Responsibilities:

Rapid Discovery Profiling (Phase 0):

• Conduct intensive data profiling on legacy CRM systems (Salesforce instances) to rapidly build functional familiarity with historical customer data, regional formatting variations, and business-unit-specific practices.
• Validate the account hierarchy model against real OEM/supplier/dealer relationships.
• Proactively map out key operational business contacts across Sales, Finance, and Customer Support to form working coalitions and accelerate conflict resolution.

Upstream CRM Quality Process Controls:

• Work directly with CRM users and administrators to correct erroneous source data identified during early migration profiling cycles.
• Collaborate closely with the governance team, Lead Data Architect, and legacy CRM product teams to design and implement necessary validation controls in the source CRMs (e.g., locking critical fields, defining validation rules, and establishing process flows for data updates) to guarantee source data is as clean as possible prior to ETL extraction.

Record Resolution Validation:

• Own business sign-off on the golden record definition and on test/migration datasets.
• Resolve highly complex, ambiguous, or overlapping customer accounts flagged by custom matching and deduplication runs.
• Validate the newly proposed customer account hierarchy structures using active business scenarios (including partial ownership, joint ventures, and multi-brand dealership structures).
• Demonstrated use of AI tools and agents to streamline activities.

Change Advocacy Enablement:

• Act as the primary change agent and operational bridge between the project team and corporate business units.
• Co-design training materials, deliver structured enablement sessions, and champion continuous data governance best practices to prevent regression in data quality.

UAT Defect Triage Live Operations:

• Lead triaging efforts during Q4 2026 UAT to clearly isolate core migration data defects from underlying ERP application or environment configurations.
• Provide hands-on operational escalation support during the active 12-month post-cutover synchronization period, handling records that cannot be systematically reconciled by the automated bidirectional sync.

Required Qualifications Experience:

• Rapid Onboarding Stakeholder Navigation: Proven experience stepping into highly complex, unfamiliar corporate landscapes as a contractor and establishing cross-functional credibility/trust within the first 30 days.
• Process Negotiation Diplomacy: Demonstrated ability to influence process improvements and negotiate system changes (such as field locks and update restrictions) with local business units and CRM administrators without formal authority.
• Strong Industry/Domain Experience: Direct, practical experience working with complex, multi-tier account structures (e.g., automotive OEM/dealer networks, franchise operations, or multi-tier commercial distribution) is highly preferred to offset the lack of company tenure.
• Technical Data Analysis Skills: Strong proficiency in SQL for writing queries, profiling databases, and conducting independent data investigations. High comfort level with Excel and Power BI. (Familiarity with Python is a strong plus). Experience leveraging AI-assisted tools for data classification, semantic matching, fuzzy search, or workflow automation.

• Data Governance Quality Fundamentals: Proven understanding of MDM concepts, including golden records, data lineage, data quality metrics, and survivorship logic. Prior experience supporting a data migration or MDM project from the business side.

• CRM System Familiarity: Solid experience working with or navigating major CRM ecosystems (e.g., Salesforce) to rapidly understand operational interfaces and user entries.

Nice to Have:

• Prior experience on a large-scale CRM-to-ERP or custom MDM implementation project.