Managing governance artifacts

You create governance artifacts to implement your governance framework. As your framework evolves, you can update your existing governance artifacts, add artifacts, or delete obsolete artifacts.

You use the same processes to manage most types of governance artifacts. For example, you create, edit, and delete business terms, data classes, classifications, reference data sets, policies, and governance rules in the same ways. However, you use a different process to manage data protection rules and data location rules. See Managing data protection rules and Managing data location rules.

You can manage most types of governance artifacts in these ways:

Required permissions

To create, edit, or delete any type of governance artifact, except data protection rules and data location rules, these conditions must be met:

You must have one of these user permissions:
- Access governance artifacts
- Manage governance categories
- Administer governance artifacts
You must have one of these category collaborator roles in the primary category for the artifact:
- Admin
- Owner
- Editor
- A custom role with the permissions to manage an artifact type, for example create, edit, delete an artifact type.
You must be an assignee of the workflow that governs the combination of category, governance artifact type, and action that you want to perform.

Creating governance artifacts

Before you create a governance artifact, design it:

To create a governance artifact:

From the main menu, open Governance and select the type of governance artifact that you want to create.
Click the button to create a new governance artifact. If you don't see the new artifact button, you don't have the Editor, Admin, or Owner role in any categories. Ask a category owner to add you with one of the roles.
Complete the required information and click Save as draft.
The new governance artifact is opened on the Overview tab, where you can review it and edit its relationships and other properties. See Artifact properties.
To publish the artifact, click Send for approval to send the governance artifact for approval according to your workflow definition. If you send the artifact for approval and then you change its primary category, the workflow continues as specified for the original primary category.

Editing artifacts

Individual edits

You can edit an artifact to update its properties. When you edit the artifact, a draft version of the artifact is created and the original artifact remains the published version of the artifact. When you finish editing, you publish the updated artifact to replace the original artifact.

If you don't see the edit icon () for an artifact, you don't have the required role in its primary category. Ask a category owner to assign you the Editor role in the category, or a custom role with the permission to edit the artifact type.

To edit an artifact:

Open the artifact and then perform the appropriate actions:
- Click the edit icon next to the property that you want to change.
- Click the plus icon next to an undefined property that you want to add.
- Select an option from the overflow menu next to the artifact name. For example, you can select Rename to change the name of the artifact.
When you finish editing the artifact, you can leave it as draft, or start the publishing process:
- To leave the artifact as draft, close it. The governance artifact is listed on the Draft tab.
- To start the publishing process, click Send for approval. The governance artifact moves to the next step in the workflow definition. If before you send the artifact for approval you change its primary category, the workflow continues as specified for the original primary category.

Bulk edits

You can edit various properties for multiple governance artifacts of the same type at once. Bulk edits are available for primary and secondary category, relationships, tags, stewards, and custom properties. Draft artifacts can also be edited in bulk, but you can't change their primary category.

You can edit up to 200 artifacts at once.

To edit the properties for multiple published artifacts:

Select artifact type from the main menu.
In the Published tab select the artifacts that you want to edit.
Click Edit and select the property to change. Make your updates and save.

The modified artifacts are saved as drafts and are all part of the same workflow task. You can view them in the Draft tab. These artifacts can only be processed in batch, that is, you can only publish or discard changes for the whole batch of edited artifacts at once.

To edit the properties of draft artifacts:

Select artifact type from the main menu.
In the Draft tab select the artifacts that you want to edit. Note that you can only select the artifacts that are part of the same workflow task. If you select artifacts from different workflow tasks, the edit options are unavailable.
Click Edit and select the property to change. Primary category can't be modified for draft artifacts. Make your updates and save.

Changes to the draft artifacts are saved immediately.

Deleting or removing artifacts

You can delete governance artifacts in these ways:

Delete one artifact at a time
Delete draft artifacts of the same type
Delete published artifacts of the same type

Deleting one artifact at a time

Note: Depending on the workflow process defined, there might be different or more steps for approval or review before you can delete governance artifacts.

To delete a draft artifact, perform the appropriate action depending on your workflow process:

Select the artifact type from Governance from the navigation menu and select the Draft tab. Select the artifact that you want to delete and click Delete draft.
Choose Task inbox from the navigation menu, select the assigned task, then delete or approve the deletion and click Publish.
Open the draft artifact and click Delete draft.

To delete a published artifact:

Open the artifact and select Mark for deletion from the overflow menu. A draft version of the artifact is created and starts the deletion workflow. In the meantime, the original artifact remains published.
If necessary for the workflow, an assigned user must approve the deletion.
An assigned user must click Publish to complete the deletion.
The artifact is deleted from both tabs, Published and Draft.

Deleting draft artifacts of the same type

To delete draft artifacts of the same type:

Select the artifact type from Governance from the navigation menu and select the Draft tab.
Select the checkbox of the draft artifacts that you want to remove. Note that you can only select the artifacts that are part of the same workflow task.
Click Delete draft.

The artifacts are removed from the Draft tab immediately.

Deleting published artifacts of the same type

To delete published artifacts of the same type:

Choose Governance from the navigation menu and select the type of governance artifact that you want to process, such as Governance > Business Terms. The Published tab shows the list of published artifacts.
Select the checkbox of the artifacts that you want to delete or click the checkbox in the top line of the list to select all published artifacts available.
Select Mark for deletion and confirm that you want to delete the artifacts. The drafts with Marked for deletion status are now listed in the Draft tab, the original artifacts remain published.
Select the draft artifacts with the same status from the list and click Go to task. If you have the appropriate permissions or access rights, or you are the user who is assigned to work on this task in the workflow, you can delete the whole list of artifacts selected.

When the task is processed, the published artifacts are removed from both tabs, Published and Draft.

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Parent topic: Governance artifacts