Each year, I'm excited to see the awards nominations for Data Steward of the Year come in. It's not just because we enjoy seeing the program grow each year (which is true, based on the number of nominations we receive). It's also because of the variety of the nominations – and the impressive work that people are doing each year to manage data.

This year's field was incredibly deep. We had nominations from three continents and a variety of industries. The data stewards in the competition worked for organizations that were big and small.  After our distinguished panel reviewed the nominations, we are excited to name Maureen Spence of Capital One as the 2013 Data Steward of the Year. Maureen is a Senior MIS Analyst Manager at Capital One. She leads a team that supports all Bank Data Store applications, as well as more than 1,000 direct and 10,000 indirect users.

In her nomination, her colleague worked tirelessly to automate processes and enable data information availability to all end users. Maureen partners with IT and business stakeholders daily. Her co-workers see her as an invaluable team member, and customers consider her their go-to problem-solver.

Maureen, pictured here, picked up her Stewie at the 2013 Data Governance Winter Conference. Congratulations to Maureen for a job well done!

Maureen's nomination was the epitome of what a data steward strives to be. She works to make sure data is available to all and builds a bridge between business and IT stakeholders. She supports a huge network of users while doing the behind-the-scenes work that allows businesses to run effectively.

For those that didn't take home the prize, there were still some terrific submissions. Some highlights that I found from the entries we received:

• One data steward saw his workload double during a corporate merger. The work was obviously quite taxing, but he stuck it out to help establish data governance and master data management efforts for the newly formed company.
• Another entry cited a data steward at an electric utility as someone who was "able to discuss extremely technical points" with his internal customers, all of whom are engineers. He learned their taxonomy and terms and can translate their needs into the data management framework.
• Across entries, words like "indispensable" and "irreplaceable" are scattered across the nominations. I can think of no two better words to describe the data stewards I've met.

Many thanks to everyone who nominated a colleague for the 2013 Data Steward of the Year award. Look forward to new and more interesting stories in 2014!