The following roles and accountabilities should be defined as part of information management human resources policies:

Management roles 

• Chief executive officer (CEO) is accountable to the board of directors for implementing an information management framework;

• Chief information officer (CIO) is accountable to the CEO for establishing the appropriate strategies, plans, processes, tools, and organizational constructs that ensure successful information management implementation.

• Information Management Architect is accountable to the CIO for establishing strategies, plans, processes, and tools required for successful information management implementation

Business roles

• Business data owner (data guardian), is accountable for
• Establishing the data classification for information for which they are responsible;
• Identifying the appropriate level of protection for that information; and 
• For ensuring that the information is handled accordingly.

• Data steward is accountable for managing data within a business area and is responsible for data requirements, standards, access rules, and business training.

IT professional project development roles

• Data architect/project manager has overall responsibility for architecture and design, development, testing and project implementation including responsibility for project planning, obtaining appropriate resources and for status reporting to the sponsor and other external stakeholders;

• Data modeler is responsible for analyzing data requirement and documenting these requirements in the form of data models;

• Data analyst is responsible for analyzing source data quality and for developing source to target mapping documents (including data business transformation rules);

• Business intelligence analyst is responsible for analyzing analytical, reporting, and decision-making requirements and for documenting these in the requirements document;

• Database administrator (DBA) is responsible for creating all development/test database environments and for building the development/test databases;

• Data movement designer is responsible for the overall design of the data movement (extract, transform and load) solution. This includes producing all design deliverables and for leading integration testing;

• Data integration developer is responsible for developing, and unit testing, extract, transform and load software; and

• Business intelligence/reporting designer/developer is responsible for developing, and unit testing, all BI reporting components.

Test team roles

• Quality assurance (QA) test lead is responsible for quality assurance testing the entire solution to ensure that it is ready for user acceptance testing; and

• Quality assurance tester is responsible for:
• Creating QA test cases/test steps;
• Documenting all test results; and 
• Identifying QA test defects.

Release to production roles

The production support/release manager is responsible for managing the release implementation process.


Information management human resources policies should ensure that:

An information management human resource strategy is created.
Human resource policy should account for information management policy for information technology jobs, information management resources and data warehouse experts.
A human resources policies job description should be created for the following management jobs

• Information management architect; and
• Project management job.

Human resources job descriptions should be created for the following business roles:

• Business data owner (data guardian); and
• Data steward.

Data guardians should be appointed for all information areas.
Data stewards should be appointed.
The human resource planning process should define roles, responsibilities and accountabilities for the following human resource staffing information management jobs:

• Business intelligence analyst;
• Business systems analyst;
• Change management jobs;
• Configuration management jobs;
• Data analyst jobs;
• Data architect jobs;
• Database administrator jobs (DBA);
• Database developer;
• Information management jobs;
• Information technology jobs;
• Lead developer;
• Management information system jobs;
• Project administrator;
• Project management job;
• Project manager;
• Quality assurance jobs;
• Software development jobs (ETL developer);
• Software testing jobs;
• Systems analyst;
• Technical lead; and
• Technical writer jobs.

These accountabilities should be clearly defined in corporate policy.
The accountabilities should be communicated to all stakeholders.
A R-Responsible, A-Accountable, C-Consult, I-Informed (RACI) matrix should be prepared.
Data warehouse roles and responsibilities should be clearly defined.
Project management roles should be clearly defined.
Meta data management roles should be defined.
Quality assurance roles should be clearly defined.
Project human resource management should include standards and best practices for the following:

• Human resource planning;
• Managing human resources; and
• Human resource management information

The organization should consider the benefit of outsourcing human resources such as:

• Business consultants;
• Business intelligence consulting;
• Consulting business intelligence;
• Consulting project management;
• Data warehouse consultants;
• Database consultant;
• Information management consultants;
• Information management consulting;
• Management information consulting;
• Outsource software development; and
• Project management consulting.

The organization should have a clearly defined human resource outsourcing recruitment plan.
Human resource management policies should include provision for human resource management for human resources outsourcing.
A sufficient number of trained professionals should be available to handle the anticipated information management workload
Training and/or additional support should be considered.

Human resources policies summary...

Information management projects are data centric and require specialized human resources policies to ensure highly skilled IT professional specialists are available early in the project, to define requirements, and thru-out the project to ensure adequate testing.