The rapid growth of data-intensive organizations has fundamentally altered how managerial work is structured, evaluated, and legitimized. Traditional business management roles have long been anchored in process ownership, emphasizing efficiency, control, and accountability within clearly defined operational boundaries. While this model has proven effective in stable and process-driven environments, it increasingly struggles to capture how value is created and sustained in organizations where data flows continuously across functions, decisions are highly interdependent, and outcomes emerge systemically rather than sequentially. This paper examines the limitations of process ownership as a dominant managerial logic in data-intensive organizations and proposes value stewardship as an alternative framework for understanding contemporary management roles. Adopting a business management perspective, the study conceptualizes data-intensive organizations as integrated management systems in which value creation cannot be reduced to isolated processes or functional ownership. In such environments, managers contribute less by optimizing individual processes and more by stewarding value across interconnected activities, decisions, and data-driven feedback loops. The paper argues that value stewardship represents an evolution in managerial responsibility, shifting the focus from local process performance to enterprise-level value coherence. The paper develops a conceptual framework that explains how managerial roles evolve from process ownership toward value stewardship in data-rich contexts. It highlights how decision authority, accountability, and coordination are reconfigured as managers become responsible for aligning data, strategy, and organizational action rather than controlling discrete workflows. By linking managerial role redesign to value creation, the study extends business management theory beyond process-centric models and offers a new lens for understanding leadership in data-intensive organizations. This research contributes to business management scholarship by reframing managerial roles around value stewardship as a system-level capability. It provides theoretical insights and practical implications for organizations seeking to redesign management roles that remain effective in environments defined by pervasive data, continuous feedback, and complex interdependence.
Seyfi Demirsoy (Fri,) studied this question.