Form an information governance team

Governance refers to the procedures that your organization uses to maintain oversight and accountability of assets. Form a multidisciplinary team to be responsible for catalog governance.

To get the correct content into the catalog, identify the people who know the most about the subject areas in your organization.

Typically, these types of people form an information governance team that designs and maintains catalogs:

Metadata project leaders: Metadata project leaders are in charge of overseeing and managing data compliance issues within an organization. They ensure that assets and their relationship to other assets conform to business policies and legal regulations. In addition, they define the scope of the metadata project and assign tasks to team members.
Data administrators: Data administrators import and manage assets in the catalog such as databases, data files, business intelligence (BI) reports and models, and logical data model definitions.
Subject matter experts: Subject matter experts understand the business use of terms, their dependencies, and their relationships to other terms. Subject matter experts create and define terms.
Business analysts: Business analysts know the business definitions of terms for each business entity and receive requirements for delivering information to business audiences. The business analysts work with subject matter experts to establish a list of terms that represent the most common words that are used in reports, applications, and general communication. They ensure that the definitions of the terms are consistent with the goals of the organization.
Compliance officers: Compliance officers define and enforce information governance policies that the organization must adhere to in order to meet internal, regulatory, and legal requirements. They ensure that information complies with quality, security, privacy, and other governance criteria.
Data analysts: Data analysts work with data sources. They collaborate with the compliance officers to create information governance rules and apply information governance rules to data sources. In addition, the data analysts create connections between the information governance rules and operational rules, such as data quality, privacy, and data transformation rules.
Data architects: Data architects understand the physical and structural aspects of the data sources that terms and information governance rules might be assigned to. They find the terms or assets such as database tables, jobs, and other assets to assign to the term or rule. They establish the relationships between terms and where the terms are physically stored.

When the information governance team plans the catalog structure, they consider the following questions:

What categories and terms are needed? Which categories contain which terms?
Can existing categories and terms be imported into the catalog?
Which categories are the top-level categories, and which categories are subcategories?
What labels can be defined to classify the catalog and metadata content?
Which catalog properties can be used to express how concepts are related to one another?
What custom attribute fields can be defined in the catalog to capture more types of information that relates to the organization?
What information governance policies and information governance rules need to be included in the catalog?
What subject matter experts can be assigned as stewards to be responsible for the definition, purpose, and use of the asset?
What information assets need to be included in the catalog and how do they relate to existing terms, information governance policies, and information governance rules?

If the information governance team can answer these questions, it can build a catalog structure that is simple for users to understand and that supports the goals of their organization.