21.9 Governance, Metadata & Lineage
Governance makes enterprise data understandable, trusted and accountable.
Governance domains
Business glossary
Defines business language.
Catalog
Enables discovery of trusted assets.
Lineage
Explains where data came from and how it changed.
Quality
Measures correctness and completeness.
Ownership
Defines accountability.
Metadata minimum
For important assets capture:
- business name
- technical name
- definition
- owner
- source
- classification
- refresh
- quality status
- lineage
- consumer impact
Lineage use cases
Lineage should answer:
If I change this source column, what breaks?
and:
If this KPI is wrong, where did the value originate?
Governance anti-pattern
A catalog populated with thousands of undocumented technical objects is not governance maturity.
Architect rule
Prioritize governance on business-critical data products, shared semantic assets and regulated data first.