Chapter 08: Implementation Guide

6-Month Roadmap

Phase 1 (Week 1-4): Planning

Inventory data sources
Collect requirements from stakeholders
Run POC and select platform

Phase 2 (Week 5-12): MVP

Install data catalog platform
Connect 3-5 core data sources
Define 20-30 key business terms
Pilot with 5-10 users

Phase 3 (Week 13-20): Expansion

Connect all data sources (20-30)
Implement lineage tracking
Auto-classification system
Roll out to 100+ users

Phase 4 (Week 21-26): Optimization

Performance tuning
Establish governance policies
Training programs
Continuous improvement

Success Metrics (KPIs)

Adoption: 80%+ MAU from data teams
Quality: 80%+ datasets with descriptions
Productivity: Data discovery time 3 days → 5 min (99% reduction)
Compliance: 100% PII tracking

ROI Calculation Example

Costs (Year 1): $220,000 (licenses, infrastructure, implementation, operations)

Savings (Year 1): $750,000 (search time, duplicate work, data quality, compliance)

ROI: 241% | Payback: 3.5 months

Best Practices

✅ Automate metadata collection
✅ Start small, expand gradually
✅ Collect user feedback regularly
✅ Measure and improve quality
✅ Invest in user training
❌ Don't try to be perfect from day one
❌ Don't focus on technology over UX
❌ Don't make it a one-time project

Common Pitfalls & Solutions

Low adoption: Find quick wins, grow champions
Poor quality: Automate, show quality dashboard
Slow search: Optimize Elasticsearch
Governance resistance: Gradual introduction, flexibility

🎉 Congratulations! You've completed the Data Catalog guide!

Reference Standards

Implementation guidance in WIA-DATA-007 builds on a layered selection of international standards covering security, privacy, accessibility, and software-quality:

ISO/IEC 27001:2022 — Information security management systems.
ISO/IEC 27018:2019 — PII protection in public clouds.
ISO/IEC 27701:2019 — Privacy information management.
ISO/IEC 25010:2011 — Software product quality model (functional suitability, performance efficiency, compatibility, usability, reliability, security, maintainability, portability).
W3C WCAG 2.2 — Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, Level AA target.
RFC 8259 — JSON encoding of API payloads.
RFC 9110, RFC 9112, RFC 9113 — HTTP semantics, HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2.
RFC 8446 — TLS 1.3.

Deployment Topologies

Three deployment topologies are supported:

Single-tenant SaaS — One catalog instance per organisation; lowest operational burden.
Hybrid — Metadata store within the organisation's network, search and UI hosted; addresses sovereignty constraints.
Air-gapped — Full deployment within the organisation's perimeter; required for highly classified environments.

Operational Readiness Checklist

Service-Level Objectives published (search latency, ingest latency, lineage freshness).
Disaster recovery plan with RTO/RPO matching ISO/IEC 27031:2011 guidance.
Quarterly access review per ISO/IEC 27001 Annex A.9.2.5.
Documented onboarding flow with WCAG 2.2 conformance evidence.
Incident playbook with RFC 9457 problem-detail templates for the public API.

Closing

A data catalog is, finally, a contract: that anyone in the organisation who needs to know what data exists, who owns it, and how to use it responsibly, can find that knowledge without asking. The standards in this chapter let the contract be written down, audited, and trusted across organisational boundaries.

Practical Application

An implementation is ready for real workload when seven indicators are simultaneously green:

Search latency 95th percentile under one second on production data volumes.
Catalog ingest end-to-end latency within the published SLO (five minutes for push, twenty-four hours for pull).
Lineage coverage above seventy percent of regulated reporting paths.
Quality scoring runs nightly without operational toil.
WCAG 2.2 Level AA conformance verified by automated and manual review.
RFC 9457 problem-detail responses on the public API; rate-limit headers emitted on all throttled endpoints.
Disaster-recovery drill completed within the past twelve months, with RTO/RPO matching the ISO/IEC 27031:2011 expectations for the deployment topology.

Until all seven are green, the catalog is in pilot. After all seven are green, the catalog is the operating record for data in the organisation, and it can be relied on by regulated processes that previously depended on email and spreadsheets.