NetApp's approach to data governance enables trusted decision-making

NetApp, a Fortune 500 technology company with 10,000+ employees, began partnering with Collibra in 2011 to fix a fragmented landscape of more than 50 data dictionaries scattered across spreadsheets, documents, SharePoint, and unwritten tribal knowledge. It built a business-led, federated governance model: consolidating dictionaries into a centralized glossary, deploying more than 160 data stewards across business lines, adding a "find a definition" homepage widget, folding glossary training into HR onboarding, and running semi-annual content reviews with executive sponsorship for new domains. The homepage widget drove usage up by more than 200%, and the program achieved consistent, accurate definitions and trusted decision-making company-wide, summarized in the line: "Our strategy has been about business adoption and keeping it simple."

Collibra is a data-governance and catalog platform used to keep data trustworthy, traceable and compliant enough to support an AI initiative.

This sits in the Design & Stress-Test stage of the AI use-case lifecycle: Named examples from the tools pharma teams use to scope, prototype and benchmark an AI use case before committing to build it — data-catalog, sandbox and evaluation platforms.