Policy 46 defines four types of information management role:
- Information Stewards provide strategic oversight of information management and Policy 46 compliance, rather than having daily involvement in information management.
- Information Custodians are the individuals with operational responsibilities for managing information.
- Information Users: All members of the University community, including most visitors to the University, are users of information within the scope of Policy 46.
- Information Service Providers are the employees, contractors, and external service providers providing information systems support and other services to information custodians and users.
Information Stewards
Information stewards are the senior administrators who:
- Have university-level strategic planning and direction, leadership, and policy-based responsibility for the functional area of administration in which collections of information are created and used.
- Are responsible for providing answers, or for ensuring that answers are provided, to the President, Provost, or the Board of Governors, if questions ever arise about how the information associated with an area of administration is being managed or used by the University, as a whole.
The Directory of Administrative Information Stewards lists the University's information stewards and their areas of responsibility.
Each of the University's records retention schedules lists the information stewards for the information within its scope.
Information Custodians
Almost all University employees are information custodians: if you keep or add to collections of physical or electronic information - e.g., paper files in a filing cabinet, electronic files on a shared drive or in SharePoint, or records in a database - in your work for the University then you are an information custodian for that information, to some degree.
Information management responsibilities of custodians are often shared with a work group or team, when group members have responsibilities specific to their job for adding, updating, or deciding when to delete information.
The degree of your responsibility depends on your position within the administrative hierarchy of our unit, or your role in a project or other initiative. For example, just as managers have overall responsibility for the work carried out by the staff members reporting to them, they also have overall responsibility for the information associated with this work.
Information Service Providers
Information service providers are typically IT staff - University employees, contractors, and employees of external service providers such as cloud-based IT services - providing systems support and IT services needed by information custodians and users.
For example, if a collection of information is stored electronically on a server, the systems administrator who maintains that server, the network administrator for the network connected to that server, and the web developer who maintains the web application that collects and stores the information are all information service providers. The information custodians will be the staff in the administrative units that need and use the information in their daily work for the University.
Information service providers require access to the information managed in the systems they support, not because they are concerned with the actual content but in order to ensure the effective functioning of the system and to plan for system or service changes required by information custodians and users.
Some information service providers are not IT staff, but instead assist University employees with their information management responsibilities. For example:
- The Privacy Officer, provides guidance concerning the statutory requirements for freedom of information and the protection of privacy.
- The University Records Manager, is responsible for developing and promoting compliance with the University's records management program.
- Institutional Analysis & Planning (IAP) staff support data collection and data management standards at the University.