Federated Governance with Governance Domains

Governance Domains are a main business or governance boundary used to scale governance in Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog.

Why federate?

Central governance teams may not know every business definition, data use case or ownership decision across a large organisation. A federated model keeps common standards while delegating appropriate decisions to accountable people closest to the data.

How Purview supports this

• Governance Domain Owners provide local decision authority.
• Data Product Owners are accountable for governed data products.
• Data Stewards perform much of the detailed curation and maintenance.
• Catalog and Data Map permissions provide separate business and technical access controls.

Design principle

The domain model should be understandable to the organisation and stable enough to support ownership over time. Avoid creating domains simply to mirror every technical platform or project unless that boundary represents a real governance responsibility.

PoC / Proof of Value recommendation

Microsoft Purview supports five Governance Domain types: Functional Unit, Line of Business, Data Domain, Regulatory and Project.

For an initial PoC / Proof of Value, consider Functional Unit where the ownership policy assigns accountability by organisational function. If the ownership policy follows another boundary, select the domain type that reflects the actual ownership model.

Ownership policy should drive domain design.