Plan for data governance with Microsoft Purview

Before you get started with data governance, there are important planning activities and considerations that should be reviewed by your information technology and data management teams. Thoroughly understanding and planning for deployment will help ensure that your implementation and use of features in Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog and Microsoft Purview Data Map go smoothly and align with the best practices.

Note

Check to see which regions are supported for Microsoft Purview data governance solutions.

Relationship between Unified Catalog and Data Map

The Data Map is the technical layer of Microsoft Purview that stores the data about the assets. Data sources are scanned to create the inventory of what assets are available in the different data sources across your organization's data estate.

The Unified Catalog is the business-friendly layer where data stewards curate data, and data consumers find the right data to use. The Unified Catalog is powered by the asset inventory in the Data Map to create a marketplace of data products, ensuring consumers can find the right data and use it responsibly.

Important

As you work with Data Map and Unified Catalog, keep these points in mind:

• All data in Data Map and Unified Catalog is metadata, not the underlying data itself.
• None of the permissions or roles in Data Map or Unified Catalog provide access to underlying data itself.

Who to involve in data governance

When you start your data governance planning with data owners, data stewards, and other business users with expertise, you'll ensure that the Unified Catalog has all of the information needed to build new value with data. IT teams are critical organizational partners in their data use, and help to ensure the right data sources are prioritized for onboarding to the Data Map.

Your organization's data office will oversee the creation of the catalog with company-wide standards, and help build bridges between teams to provide the best governance framework. Having both the data publishing teams and the data consumers included in the process of building out the catalog will provide the most value from the data, and build the collaboration to include all of the experts across your organization.

Tip

For the best success, it's critical to involve all parties early. This is because the practice of data governance isn't done by a single person, and no one knows everything about the data, the business, and what it means to use that data responsibly.

Where to start

There's more than one way to start building your data governance practice with Microsoft Purview. How you start is up to you. The sequence in which you perform your initial setup tasks might depend on your business strategy and who's doing the work. Regardless of the order, the full value of Microsoft Purview for data governance isn't realized until all key tasks are completed. The tabs below provide guidance based on your situation or preferred approach.

New to Microsoft Purview or data governance

If you're new to data governance or to Microsoft Purview, we suggest starting with the stakeholders who are most passionate about data governance, or have the need to create a data catalog. Typically, business intelligence teams or data lake teams can be a good place to start because they have experts on the data and have invested in building data that others can use.

When you're ready to get started, we recommend doing the tasks outlined in Getting started with data governance in the following order:

1. Create a governance domain (Unified Catalog).
2. Add a domain owner who will be accountable for that domain (Unified Catalog).
3. Add the experts for that part of business to build business concepts (Unified Catalog).
4. Create a collection (Data Map).
5. Add a data source administrator from the data platform to onboard first (Microsoft Purview settings).
6. Register and scan the data source (Data Map).
7. Build out the data products for the most important and frequently used data in that source in the governance domain (Unified Catalog).

Technical staff ready to start working with data

If you're in the IT department and want to start working with your data, we recommend doing the tasks outlined in Getting started with data governance in the following order:

1. Create a collection for your data sources (Data Map).
2. Register and scan your data (Data Map).
3. Create a governance domain aligned to the area of the business or data domain that your data sources support (Unified Catalog).
4. Curate the data assets, ensuring that data lineage is added where possible and that users will be able to understand how that asset was created and what it contains (Unified Catalog).
5. Create data products from the most requested data, including details on how to use that data effectively (Unified Catalog).
6. Run some basic data quality rules to show the data assets are good to use (Unified Catalog).
7. Publish your data products and advertise the data you support with your business stakeholders to gain their support in completing the governance domain (Unified Catalog).
8. Add the assets to your data products (Unified Catalog).

Data stewards who want to first plan a strategy

If you're a data steward or owner, and want to start by considering what's in your organization and how it should be organized, we recommend doing the tasks outlined in Getting started with data governance in the following order:

1. Create a governance domain for the data you're accountable for (Unified Catalog).
2. Create the glossary terms, critical data elements, and objectives and key results to give context to what your area of the business cares about (Unified Catalog).
3. Create some data products for what you would like to start governing, to ensure your business has the best data to meet your needs (Unified Catalog).
4. Collaborate with your technical and data teams to show what you would like to do with the data and find what data would fit your data products.
5. Create a collection for your technical partner (Data Map).
6. Have your technical partners register and scan the data source (Data Map).
7. Add the recommended assets to your data product to showcase in the Unified Catalog.

Permissions hierarchy

Before you start assigning roles and permissions to users in your organization, it's helpful to understand the relationship between the primary data governance solutions, Unified Catalog and Data Map, and the permissions granted by the roles for each solution.

• Tenant, or organization: Users who own the Microsoft Purview instance and need access to maintain its permissions and information.
• Data Map: Grants permissions to create and administrate technical domains and collections.
• Unified Catalog: Grants users permission to create governance domains or access data estate health.
• Governance domain: Grants permissions for objects within a governance domain, such as glossary terms or data products.

When you're ready to start assigning roles and permissions, Data governance roles and permissions gives detailed instructions. To guide you through the process, we recommend beginng with Getting started with data governance.

Next steps

• Ready to grant access and assign roles? Visit Roles and permissions.
• If you're ready to start setting up things, visit Get started with data governance.
• Want to follow an example? Review a walkthrough of a sample data governance setup.