For Sponsors and Leaders

Do not sponsor a catalogue implementation

Ask leaders to sponsor a measurable change in how the organisation owns, governs, discovers, understands and consumes data.

Sponsorship is a two-way agreement

A federated operating model needs more than technology. Sponsors must provide the authority, priority and protected capacity that allow domain roles to govern data effectively.

What the Sponsor provides

• Authority: resolve cross-domain ownership, policy and priority conflicts.
• Federated mandate: approve the central-versus-domain decision-rights model and empower domains to act within it.
• Priority: make governance work a legitimate part of delivery, not an optional extra.
• Capacity: protect Governance Domain Owner, Product Owner, Steward, Custodian and SME time.
• Funding: support technology, implementation, enablement and BAU operation.
• Accountability: review outcomes, domain health and benefits and challenge barriers or poor adoption.
• Advocacy: explain why governed self-service and accountable domain ownership matter.

What the programme commits to

• Transparent decision rights and role responsibilities.
• Evidence and measurable outcomes rather than activity reporting alone.
• Transparent measures and assumptions.
• Regular domain health, adoption and benefits reporting.
• Clear escalation of barriers, risks, cross-domain conflicts and capacity constraints.
• Continuous improvement based on consumer behaviour and domain feedback.

What we are asking the Sponsor to approve

• Approve a 90-day Proof of Value: test the federated, outcome-led model in 1–2 meaningful domains.
• Nominate accountable business roles: Sponsor, Governance Domain Owners, Product Owners, Stewards and consumer representatives.
• Approve enterprise guardrails and delegated decision rights: define what is central, domain-owned and shared.
• Protect role capacity: allocate explicit time for onboarding, curation, quality, access decisions and review.
• Enable access to evidence: usage, support, access and cost data needed to measure the baseline and benefits.
• Agree success measures: approve pilot OKRs, KPI baseline and benefits methodology before implementation.
• Commit to a scale decision: review evidence at day 90 and decide whether to scale, reshape or stop.

Critical Success Factors

• Executive sponsorship: senior authority can resolve cross-domain ownership, policy, funding and priority conflicts.
• Federated decision rights: everyone understands what is decided centrally, within domains and jointly.
• Business ownership, not IT ownership alone: the business owns meaning, use and accountability even where technology teams host the data.
• Clear Governance Domain model: provides the structure for federated accountability and prioritisation.
• Named Data Product Owners and Data Stewards: important products and day-to-day curation have accountable roles.
• Consumer involvement: design around real discovery and use journeys.
• Prioritisation: start with valuable/high-risk products rather than every table or asset.
• Minimum standards: define what “good enough to publish” means for metadata, quality, classification and lifecycle.
• Governed access design: connect catalogue request/approval to actual IAM/platform provisioning.
• Data Quality ownership: scores lead to named actions and improvement, not passive dashboards.
• Guided Enablement: give each persona role-based, step-by-step guidance.
• Measurable baseline: capture the current journey before implementation.
• Operational ownership: define who runs, supports, reviews and improves the service in BAU.
• Continuous improvement: use search failures, requests, quality actions, health controls and feedback to evolve the service.

Organisational capacity is a Critical Success Factor

Licences and configuration are not enough. Governance Domain Owners, Data Product Owners and Data Stewards need protected capacity. Assigning responsibility without time, authority or enablement creates distributed accountability without enabling delivery.