Data & AI Governance: Practitioner Notes From the Field
11 postsThis is the governance writing I wish existed when I was in the room making these calls — not vendor whitepapers, but anonymized notes from actual rollouts: where stewardship programs stall, where MDM really breaks (hint: it's rarely the platform), and what changes when you move access control from grants to attribute-based policy.
A growing theme is AI's effect on governance rather than the other way around: what least-privilege looks like for non-human identities and autonomous agents, why your data dictionary just became your RAG infrastructure whether you planned for it or not, and how classification hygiene has to come before any ABAC rollout succeeds. I also cover the unsexy budget-and-scoring side — how to run a governance-tool RFP and build a TCO model that survives contact with procurement.
If you're standing up or rescuing a stewardship program, scoping a catalog or governance tool purchase, or trying to figure out what 'AI-ready governance' actually means before your agents start touching production data, start here.
The Semantic Layer: Where Metric Definitions Should Actually Live
Two dashboards, two revenue numbers, both defensible. The metric definition is a governed asset — and in most estates it lives in the one place governance never reaches: inside the BI tool.
Data Quality SLAs: What to Promise, What to Measure, What to Page On
A contract says what a column is; an SLA says whether it showed up. The four dimensions worth promising, why detection is cheap and paging is expensive, and how to measure what the consumer actually feels.
Data Lineage for Impact Analysis: What Breaks If I Change This Column?
Contracts, classification, and access control all assume you can trace a column backward to its source and forward to what depends on it. How lineage actually gets captured, why column-level is the threshold that makes it useful, and why the graph is a lower bound.
Data Classification at Scale: How to Actually Find and Tag Sensitive Data
Access control and AI-agent governance both assume a classification layer that's accurate and current. Here's how you actually discover, tag, and maintain it — the taxonomy, the three discovery signals, and why it goes stale.
Data Contracts: Enforcing Data Quality at the Producer Boundary
Downstream data-quality tests catch damage that already happened. A data contract moves the check to the boundary the producer controls — schema, semantics, quality thresholds, and change policy, enforced and blocking.
Governing AI Agents' Data Access: Least-Privilege for Non-Humans
Enterprises are deploying AI agents faster than their access-control models can absorb. A least-privilege framework for non-human identities: service identities, scoped tokens, and autonomy tiers mapped to data sensitivity.
Unity Catalog Access Control: From Grants to ABAC
Grant sprawl is a math problem — teams × roles × contractors. ABAC only fixes it if classification hygiene comes first. Practitioner notes on what changes, what doesn't, and where contextual policy is headed.
Running a Data Governance Tool RFP: How We Actually Scored TCO
How real capability scorecards get weighted before vendors ever demo, what belongs in a governance-tool TCO model beyond the license line, and how to cut a 20-vendor field to two without running 20 demos.
What Actually Broke in Month 3 of Our Data Stewardship Rollout
Org-chart steward assignments, unfunded curation work, definition debates re-fought as catalog edit wars, and the vanity metric that was lying to us — anonymized from an enterprise Alation rollout.
Your Data Dictionary Is Your RAG Governance Layer
RAG on an ungoverned data estate rediscovers stale definitions, homonym collisions, and answers with no lineage. The boring governance artifacts were retrieval infrastructure all along.
Customer MDM Intake: Where Data Quality Actually Dies
Everyone blames the MDM platform for dirty customer records — the real damage happens upstream at intake: free-text fields, invisible validation logic, and the portal redesign that actually fixed it.
Data & AI governance, from the field
Notes on governance that actually ships — and the free RFP & TCO scorecard as a welcome gift.
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