Change management

An integral part of data governance lies in being able to track and audit your data. The Catalog provides you with a simple and scalable solution to control changes in line with your business needs.
You can tailor who makes edits and audit changes for compliance-critical updates. Approvers can be individual users, teams, or even interested parties, giving you full control over how data governance evolves with your business.

Making changes

When you make a change in the Catalog, it will appear in your "basket" before being published for everyone else to see. This is a temporary staging area and can be accessed by the Submit changes for review icon in the header .

It will display all outgoing changes grouped into a changeset that you should carefully review and publish with a comment explaining what has changed.

Reviewing changes

As an approver, you are responsible for reviewing all incoming changes and ultimately decide whether to apply the changeset. It is here where you can view each individual change and provide feedback where necessary to the submitter. You'll have your own set of tasks to manage, which you can access via the Review tasks for approval icon in the header .

When reviewing changes to an object you will be able to see, on a field-by-field basis, the difference between the proposed object and the existing one. You will also be able to view the entire history of the object and see how it has changed over time.

Assigning approvers

As an admin, you can set up which people or groups are responsible for each area (or a specific record) in the product. These people will receive notifications when there are new changes to review, giving them full visibility and control. This can be via in-product notifications, emails, or the My tasks widget on the homepage.

To assign approvers, go to the "gear" icon on the homepage to access the data model configuration page. Within this area of the product, you can select an Object Type and use the "menu" option to access the Manage approvers function.

There are three types to choose from:

• User - An individual person responsible for reviewing all changes belonging to objects of this type.
• User group - A group of one or more people. It's best to use a user group instead of specifying individual users: in cases where a person is away or leaves the business then another person can be assigned to the group. Only one of them needs to provide approval.
• Interest Type - For example, an owner or a follower. Use this to assign different approvers to an individual object within each type. An object can have many interested parties assigned to it e.g. executive sponsors, or perhaps just one e.g. owner. Using an Interest Type as an approver is useful where a subject matter expert might be crucial to review some objects, but not all.

Changeset rejection

If an approver has rejected a changeset, you can switch back to this and make the necessary amendments before re-submitting it for review again. Any other changes you currently have will be preserved in your draft changeset. You can move to a different changeset via the Switch changeset icon in the header:

Auditing changes

Every edit in the Catalog is recorded and can be viewed in each object's History tab. In addition to showing the date and details of each change, it also gives visibility of proposed changes awaiting review.

Pending changes

Changes to an object that have not been published will only be visible to the person who made the changes and not everyone else using the system. These are marked with an appropriate icon depending on the type of change:

• Create
• Edit
• Delete