Planning to implement a governance framework

The governance framework consists of your business vocabulary, which is composed of governance artifacts. The predefined governance artifacts provide a starting point for your business vocabulary. However, your governance team must either create or import the other governance artifacts that your organization needs. After your governance team creates your business vocabulary, your data stewards can either run metadata enrichment to assign your business vocabulary to data assets.

Before your governance team creates governance artifacts, the team members must have a thorough understanding of the following aspects of governance artifacts and rules:

The purpose of each type of artifact
The implications of relationships between artifacts
How artifact assignments affect assets
How to design each type of artifact
The purpose and structure of any existing artifacts
How you can use artifacts to specify the data to protect in data protection rules

Depending on your implementation strategy, your governance team can create your business vocabulary before putting the platform into production or while the platform is in use.

Task	Mandatory?	Timing
Create or import the governance artifacts for your business vocabulary	No	Anytime

Learn more about governance artifacts

Create or import governance artifacts for your business vocabulary

Many types of governance artifacts act as a business vocabulary to describe data assets, such as, business terms, data classes, reference data sets, and classifications. Some types of governance artifacts act as metadata for other artifacts, such as, policies and governance rules.

Your category structure must either be in place before you add artifacts or be imported along with the artifacts.

You can use any or all methods of adding governance artifacts, depending on the following conditions:

Whether you have existing artifacts that you want to import.
Whether you want to import Knowledge Accelerators, which contain predefined sets of artifacts for specific business scopes and industries.
Whether you want to work in the product UI or through API calls.
Whether you want the new artifacts to be subject to workflow or to be published immediately.

The following table compares the methods to add artifacts, where you work, and whether the artifacts are subject to workflow.

Method	In product UI?	In API call?	Subject to workflow?
Create artifacts individually	Yes	Yes	Yes
Import each type of governance artifact in its own CSV file	Yes	Yes	Yes
Import previously exported sets of governance artifacts from a ZIP file	No	Yes	No
Knowledge Accelerators	No	Yes	No

If you choose to create governance artifacts individually, start with these tasks to obtain value quickly:

Create business terms to establish your business vocabulary so that your users can easily find the data that they need. Business terms often have relationships with data classes. While you create business terms, you might discover what types of data classes that you need to create. Add relationships between business terms to provide context, add meaning, and improve the findability of assets.
Create data classes to describe the format of data. Some data quality dimensions measure how well the data fits the assigned data classes. If necessary, create reference data sets to act as matching criteria.
Add relationships between business terms and data classes. During metadata enrichment, data classes and their related business terms are automatically assigned to data assets.

Your team can also create other types of governance artifacts:

Create classifications to label assets.
Create policies to document the guidelines and regulations of your organization.
Create governance rules to describe how to implement policies. Add the governance rules to the appropriate policies.

Learn more about creating and importing governance artifacts

Designing business terms
Data classes
Designing reference data sets
Import methods for governance artifacts
Knowledge Accelerators
Watson Data API (Each type of governance artifact has APIs)

Previous planning task

Planning to set up IBM Knowledge Catalog

Next planning tasks

Parent topic: Planning to implement data governance