Master-data stewardship navigator
Help a data steward find duplicate, conflicting, or incomplete core records and assign the right person to resolve them.
Typical roles · data stewards and business-data owners
Concept brief
Win statement
Enable data stewards and business-data owners to use Master-data stewardship navigator to reduce friction in the work, with a visible source, an exception path, and a human owner for the decision.
Description
Help a data steward find duplicate, conflicting, or incomplete core records and assign the right person to resolve them. In a cross-industry setting, the concept should be designed around the moment the user gets stuck, the approved information or action that helps, and the handoff when the agent should stop.
Key benefits
- ·Turns files, forms, and records into usable information without pretending extraction is perfect.
- ·Creates a visible exception path for low-confidence or missing information.
- ·Improves searchability, traceability, and handoff quality.
- ·Reduces repeated manual re-entry.
Potential impact
Qualitative
- ·Staff spend more time on exceptions and judgment, less on re-keying.
- ·Records are easier to find and audit.
- ·The organization learns which document types cause rework.
Quantitative
- ·20-40% less manual handling time where extraction accuracy meets the agreed threshold.
- ·Improved retrieval speed and reduced duplicate entry.
- ·A measured exception rate that guides future process improvement.
These are pilot hypotheses, not promised outcomes. Validate them against a real baseline, quality sample, and user feedback.
Success metrics
Agreement between the system result and a human-validated sample.
Pilot target · Set a field-by-field pilot threshold before scale.
Establish the current baseline before claiming improvement. Review this metric with user feedback and quality evidence.
Time spent entering, classifying, or locating information.
Pilot target · Reduce by 20-40% from baseline where quality holds.
Establish the current baseline before claiming improvement. Review this metric with user feedback and quality evidence.
Time to route and resolve a low-confidence item.
Pilot target · Measure separately from straight-through processing.
Establish the current baseline before claiming improvement. Review this metric with user feedback and quality evidence.
Users who can find the needed record or field in the intended workflow.
Pilot target · At least 80% in usability testing.
Establish the current baseline before claiming improvement. Review this metric with user feedback and quality evidence.
Services needed
Microsoft Foundry
- ·Microsoft Foundry project and Foundry Agent Service
- ·Prompt, workflow, or hosted agent design selected from the actual control and orchestration need
- ·A model selected from the Microsoft Foundry model catalog and evaluated against representative work
- ·Microsoft Entra ID, Azure RBAC, network isolation where required, and managed identities for tools
- ·Tracing, evaluation, monitoring, and operational telemetry through Foundry and Application Insights
- ·Azure AI Search for retrieval where appropriate
- ·Azure AI Document Intelligence, Azure AI Vision, or Azure AI Language when document or image understanding is required
- ·Dataverse or the approved system of record for structured workflow state
A product or mission application needs custom code, a model choice, complex tools, multi-step or multi-agent orchestration, multimodal input, evaluation, observability, network control, or a scalable managed runtime. Move to Copilot Studio when a low-code workflow and connected conversational experience can solve the problem. Move to Microsoft 365 Copilot (Premium) when the work is best handled by a licensed employee inside familiar Microsoft 365 surfaces.
Data sources
- ·Approved document repositories, forms, images, and structured systems of record
- ·Metadata, retention schedules, and classification policies
- ·Human-validated sample sets for testing accuracy and exceptions
Implementation considerations
- ·Name one accountable business owner, one technical owner, and one content or data owner before the pilot starts.
- ·Define what the agent may advise, what it may do, and what must remain a human decision.
- ·Use representative test cases, including incomplete, conflicting, and out-of-scope inputs.
- ·Design the exception path before measuring straight-through success.
- ·Measure user effort, quality, and rework together. A high interaction count alone does not show value.
- ·Select prompt, workflow, or hosted-agent architecture based on the control actually required. Do not choose hosted agents merely because they are more technical.
- ·Define model evaluation thresholds, tracing, identity, tool permissions, network requirements, and operational support before production release.
- ·Treat model and tool behavior as a product with release controls, monitoring, rollback, and a named response owner.
- ·Category-specific focus: Content & data.
Human review · A named qualified person reviews exceptions, low-confidence output, and any recommendation or action with material consequence.
Executive FAQ
Next actions
- 01Observe 5-10 real examples of master-data stewardship navigator and map the current work, delay, handoff, and exception path.
- 02Name the accountable decision owner, source owner, technical owner, and pilot audience.
- 03Choose the smallest approved content set, data set, and action set that can prove or disprove the value hypothesis.
- 04Create a representative test pack, including success, ambiguity, bad input, and escalation cases.
- 05Run a time-boxed pilot with a measured baseline and a structured user-feedback loop.
- 06Review quality, rework, safety, adoption, and value together. Expand only when the work is demonstrably better.
Estimated timeline
12-20 weeks after discovery
- Discovery, architecture, and data readiness2-4 weeks
Define the job, risk boundary, architecture, source data, tools, evaluations, and operating model.
- Proof of concept3-5 weeks
Build an instrumented, limited-scope proof of concept using representative data and test sets.
- Pilot and hardening4-6 weeks
Add identity, observability, safety controls, exception paths, and user testing in a controlled pilot.
- Production release3-5 weeks
Complete release readiness, support design, evaluation thresholds, training, and controlled scale-up.
Provenance
Inferred candidate · Microsoft Foundry (Azure)
- ·Inferred from the anonymized source corpus
- ·Next 49 logical candidate #11
Candidate. Discovery and validation required before any build commitment.