Community structure best practices

Recommendation

  • Manage the complexity of your Community structure.
  • Align community structure with your ownership model.

Impact

  • Easier to assign and manage governance tasks.
  • Supports compliance with regulations which require clear ownership of the data, such as GDPR.
  • Reduces time on ownership management.
  • Simplifies and improves navigation, enhancing user experience and adoption.
  • Aligns with organizational structure that is familiar for user community.
  • Eliminates performance bottlenecks.

Recommended action

  • As Communities are directly correlated to accountabilities and Domains are directly related to responsibilities, you should represent your community and domain structures like your organizational data ownership model, such as by function, geography, LoB, or business process. This allows you to more easily assign and manage governance tasks, which also support regulatory requirements.
  • Assign accountabilities, such as owner, custodian or council member, at the community level and assign responsibilities, such as steward, SME or stakeholder, at the domain level in RACI terms. Assign author-level permissions to the domain-level roles.
  • Follow these guidelines for the complexity of your model:
    • 3 levels is optimal.
    • 5 levels is workable.
    • 7 is the maximum level recommended, and only if absolutely necessary. This many levels may result in navigation and performance issues.
  • Develop a naming convention you can standardize for Communities and Domains. Avoid acronyms and other jargon that may not be clear to all users searching through the model. Names should reference the actual metadata that the assets, domains and communities contain. Communities and Domains appear alphabetically ordered by name, so if you need them to appear in a particular order, consider prefixing the names with numbers to allow that, for example, 01_Finance, 02_HR.
  • Avoid creating domains and communities that you are not ready to start using. Best practice for simplicity and performance of your model is to wait until there is a relevant use case.
  • Review the navigation experience of the Community or Domain structure with the user community as early in the process as possible to avoid time-consuming and complex re-work and to enhance adoption.

Collibra product capability it relates to

Operating Model

Topic area

Operating Model → Organizational Concepts → Communities, Domains

Communities and domains best practice area

Validation criteria

Run the OMRE (Operating Model Reverse Engineering) on a regular basis to identify the elements above.

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