Workflows
Collibra workflows are automated business processes that guide users through a series of steps to achieve specific data governance objectives. They are fundamental to ensuring consistency, efficiency, and compliance across your data landscape.
Whether you are
A Collibra workflow represents a defined sequence of activities, tasks, and decisions that automate and enforce data governance policies and procedures. Workflows transform manual and often ad-hoc processes into structured, repeatable, and auditable flows, offering distinct advantages such as:
- Automation: They automate complex data-related processes, reducing manual effort and potential for human error.
- Guidance: They guide users through required steps, ensuring all necessary information is provided and proper approvals are secured.
- Enforcement: They enforce data governance policies, such as checking for data quality, assigning data ownership, or providing compliance approvals.
- Integration: They can interact with assets, attributes, and relations, and also integrate with external systems.
- Auditing: They can log every step and decision within a workflow, providing a clear audit trail for compliance and reporting.
Key capabilities and use cases
Collibra workflows are highly versatile and can be tailored to a wide range of use cases:
- Manage data request and approval processes:
- Request access to data assets.
- Approve new data definitions or changes to existing ones.
- Onboard new data sources or datasets.
- Automate data quality and stewardship:
- Route data quality issues to relevant data stewards for resolution.
- Initiate cleansing processes based on data profiling results.
- Assign data ownership or stewardship roles.
- Enforce policy and compliance:
- Ensure data privacy regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA, are followed for sensitive data.
- Trigger legal or security reviews for high-risk assets.
- Manage data retention policies.
- Streamline operational tasks:
- Send automated notifications or reminders.
- Create new assets, domains, or communities programmatically.
- Update asset properties based on external events.
- Integrate with external systems:
- Trigger processes in external applications, such as ticketing systems or ETL tools, based on workflow events.
- Receive data from external systems to update Collibra assets.
How workflows work
Workflows orchestrate interactions between users, the Collibra platform, and potentially external systems.
You often get to interact with workflows through:
- Tasks: Specific actions assigned to one or more users.
- Forms: Dialog boxes where you provide information or make a decision, often pre-populated with relevant data from the platform.
- Notifications: Automated emails or messages that inform you about new tasks or workflow status changes.
- Email tasks: Custom emails that are sent to you as part of a workflow email task.
Workflows start depending on their configuration:
- Manually: You start a workflow from an asset page, a community, a dashboard, or the global Create button.
- Following an event: Workflows start automatically when specific events occur in Collibra, such as the creation of a new asset, a change in an attribute value, or the addition of a relation.
- Scheduled: Some workflows are configured to run at specific intervals.
Users interact with workflows by completing tasks in their individual task lists or directly on asset pages, which moves the process forward. Administrators monitor the status of running workflows and manage workflow instances.
To learn how to use the Workflow Designer to build workflows, go to the Collibra Developer Portal.