Introducing Custom Governance Workflow Builder

Data teams struggle with governance that's either too rigid or too manual. Pre-built workflows don't fit your business needs, while manual processes don't scale with your teams. This makes enforcing governance consistently across hundreds of assets and dozens of stakeholders feel impossible. The result? Data stewards spend hours chasing approvals, critical assets ship without review, and governance becomes a bottleneck instead of an enabler.

Collate has introduced our new Custom Governance Workflow Builder to solve this. Now, you can build exactly the governance process your organization needs—with an easy drag-and-drop builder and no code—and automate it across every data asset in your data landscape. With automated actions, custom conditions, and human-in-the-loop approvals, you can now make governance easy, automated, and a driver of better data team productivity.

From One-Size-Fits-All to Built-For-You

Every organization governs data differently, reflecting your unique business context, compliance requirements, and team structure. But until now, governance tools forced you to adapt your processes to their limitations. Custom Governance Workflows flips that model to customize the rules, processes, approvals, validations, and actions specific to your needs. And you do it all through an intuitive, visual workflow builder that lets you:

• Design: Drag-and-drop interface to build multi-stage workflows with branching logic, approval gates, and automated actions

• Orchestrate: Coordinate complex processes across teams—from data engineers to stewards to executives—with task assignment and approval thresholds

• Enforce: Run workflows automatically on schedules or trigger them when assets change, ensuring governance rules are applied consistently at scale

• Validate: Build conditional logic that checks metadata completeness, asset properties, and routes assets through different paths based on their characteristics

• Document: Every action, approval, and decision is logged automatically, creating a complete audit trail for compliance

Instead of forcing everyone through the same rigid process, you build workflows that reflect the reality of how data governance actually works in your organization.

How Custom Governance Workflows Work

Built on BPMN (Business Process Management Notation) standards and powered by Collate's OpenMetadata foundation, Custom Governance Workflows turns governance from a manual checklist into an intelligent, automated process. You can design complex, multi-stage processes using five core building blocks in the visual workflow builder:

• Condition Checks: Validate metadata conditions (tags, ownership, custom properties) and branch workflows based on results, with 13+ conditions available

• Actions: Automatically update assets—apply tags, change tiers, assign owners, add certifications

• Data Completeness: Create quality gates based on metadata coverage percentages (e.g., Gold = 100% description coverage, Silver = 75%) on selected fields

• User Approvals: Route tasks to reviewers with configurable approval thresholds (e.g., require 2 approvers) and rejection rules

• Revert: Undo changes when they don’t follow your organization's rules

The visual builder can validate workflows to ensure they are designed correctly and will flag any issues with the logic.

Why Custom Governance Workflows are Different

Many platforms offer basic governance features like tags, owners, and certification badges. But that's just metadata decoration. Custom Governance Workflows go further; it's the difference between describing governance and actually doing it. This isn't about applying a "Certified" badge on a dashboard. It's about orchestrating the entire business process behind that badge: validating metadata completeness, routing to the right reviewers, requiring consensus from multiple stakeholders, and automatically updating asset properties when approved. From conditional branching to multi-stage approvals to automated remediation, you're not just labeling assets—you're controlling the entire data governance lifecycle with logic that reflects how your organization actually works.

Human + machine, not either/or. Collate workflows orchestrate both people and systems. Route approvals to the right reviewers and set thresholds for consensus. Assign tasks automatically and track decisions across teams. Go beyond simple automations with human-in-the-loop by design. What once required custom code, scattered Slack threads, and manual tracking now runs automatically—visible, auditable, and enforceable across your entire data estate.

Build for your business needs. Every organization has unique governance requirements. Start with pre-built workflows for common patterns (e.g., dashboard certification, glossary approval), then customize them to match your exact requirements. Or build your own unique processes from scratch. You have the flexibility to create exactly what you need, from simple two-step approvals to complex, multi-branch validation trees.

Event-driven, scheduled, or on-demand. Workflows respond to change in real-time. When an asset is created or updated, your governance rules trigger automatically—catching issues before they become problems. Workflows can also be run on a schedule to meet your teams' needs, or on demand for immediate updates.

Entity-agnostic with meaning: Apply workflows to any asset type—tables, dashboards, data products, glossary terms—with the same flexible framework. Collate is built on a unified knowledge graph, which provides semantic understanding of the meaning and relationships of your data assets: lineage, usage, quality, and ownership. That means more intelligent routing, better decisions, and governance that understands the whole picture.

Transforming How Teams Govern Data

Custom Governance Workflows removes the friction between governance intent and governance reality. Data stewards enforce consistency without manual tracking. Engineers ship assets knowing they meet standards. Analysts trust that certified data has been properly reviewed. And leaders see governance as an enabler, not a blocker.

Let’s see how this plays out in practice: Marcus, a data steward, needs to ensure all Tier 1 assets meet completeness standards and receive proper review before being certified for executive reporting. Manually tracking this across 500+ tables means constant Slack messages, spreadsheet updates, and missed edge cases. Critical dashboards sometimes go live without review simply because nobody noticed.

With Custom Governance Workflows, Marcus builds a certification workflow that:

1. Checks completeness: When an asset is nominated for Tier 1, the workflow validates that descriptions, owners, and tags are 100% complete

2. Routes for approval: If the asset passes completeness checks, it automatically routes to the appropriate domain lead for review

3. Assigns tasks: Reviewers receive tasks directly in their queue with full context of each asset, thanks to the metadata agents

4. Certifies and documents: Upon approval, the asset is certified and tiered, with a complete audit trail of who reviewed it and when

Now governance runs on autopilot. Assets that meet standards flow through quickly. Edge cases are caught automatically. And Marcus spends time defining what good governance looks like rather than manually enforcing it.

Get Started Today

Custom Governance Workflows is included in Collate 1.11. This is governance designed by people, automated with intelligence, and enforced consistently across your entire data estate. Ready to build governance workflows that actually match your business? Try it out today in our product sandbox with demo data or request a demo from a Collate product expert.