Governance fails when it's a committee. Here's the lightweight Unity Catalog model we roll out in the first two weeks of an engagement.
Governance programs die when they start as a 40-page policy document. They succeed when they start as catalogs, schemas, and a handful of well-named groups.
Our default topology is one catalog per domain, environment-scoped schemas, and access granted to groups — never individuals. Tags drive classification, and lineage is captured automatically, which means audit becomes a query rather than a project.
The cultural shift is the hard part: data ownership has to sit with domains, not a central team. Unity Catalog makes that ownership legible, which is half the battle.