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Integrate (Meta)governance for Collibra Adoption

By Becky Lyons

Metagovernance refers to everything you need to do to maintain and improve your Collibra environment and its contents over time. This includes guidelines, policies, processes, standards and tools — essentially everything that is in place to ensure that Collibra continues to provide value over time with up-to-date, reliable and safe information.

Metagovernance begins with a framework that outlines roles and responsibilities within Collibra. This includes deciding who is going to make decisions about the Collibra platform, and who is going to implement them. After the framework is established, processes must be established to ensure decisions are made in an accurate, clear, consistent, and ethical manner. Then, build processes to implement those decisions. Finally, build ways to monitor the impact of the decision and its implementation.

Examples of what can be involved in metagovernance:

  • Guidelines for configuration and setup
  • Identification of roles and responsibilities
  • Guidelines for maintaining roles and responsibilities
  • Procedures and guidelines for decision-making and approval
  • Processes for implementing decisions
  • Guidelines for things like naming conventions, categories, classifications, etc.
  • Procedures and guidelines for managing permissions
  • Guidelines for how to integrate automated decision-making in Collibra with outside, manual decision-making approaches

Proactive Problem Solving

Metagovernance helps to ensure that any decisions concerning what happens in Collibra are evaluated by the right people at the right time. Metagovernance avoids problems like groups configuring parts of Collibra with little guidance, or limited visibility as to who is doing what. This way, everyone will know their roles and responsibilities.

The biggest mistake to avoid is changing roles or responsibilities without communicating the change. Metagovernance provides guidelines on how to change roles and responsibilities and communicate these changes. This will ensure that everyone working in Collibra will be aware of their functionality within the program at any given time, avoiding confusion and interference.

Other changes in Collibra also need to be driven by metgovernance, such as changes to communities and domains. Without metagovernance, metadata could be compromised, which is a costly and resource intensive mistake.

The true benefit of metagovernance is optimizing your investment. With metagovernance, you will use Collibra more efficiently. It will be easier for everyone in the organization to interact with the data and the related standards. It will also drastically reduce the risks of errors that can be made inside Collibra. Once a mistake is made and rolled out to the enterprise, it is very difficult to undo it. Metagovernance helps reduce the risk of costly mistakes while supporting transparency, data integrity, and the ability of people to use Collibra effectively.

Integrate (meta)governance is number eight of nine Collibra best practices. Be on the lookout for best practice number nine, Blend Agile and Traditional Approaches to Data Governance.

View more Collibra Best Practices article series.

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