Embarking on a journey through the labyrinth of data governance, we often find ourselves at a crossroads: How do we navigate the complexities of managing our ever-growing data landscapes while ensuring compliance, quality, and collaboration? Enter the realm of Microsoft Purview Workflow, a beacon of hope in the chaos of data management. This guide isn’t just about understanding a tool; it’s about unlocking a treasure trove of possibilities that can transform your organization’s approach to data governance. Let’s set sail on this adventure together, unraveling the mysteries of Microsoft Purview Workflow and how it stands as the vanguard of data integrity.

What is Microsoft Purview Workflow?

Microsoft Purview Workflows are automated, repeatable business processes designed to validate and orchestrate Create, Update, and Delete (CUD) operations on data entities. This system allows for the enforcement of policy compliance, ensures data quality, and facilitates user collaboration and awareness of changes across the organization. Workflows automate approval processes for data asset updates, helping maintain high-quality data management practices​​​​.

Problems Solved by Workflows

Workflows address several key challenges in data governance, including:

• Ensuring data quality and compliance with policies before any changes (creation, update, deletion) are made to data entities.
• Automating the approval process for data changes, reducing manual effort, and increasing efficiency.
• Enhancing team collaboration and transparency by tracking and notifying relevant stakeholders about data entity changes.

Let’s understand it with an example of a Problem and how the workflow solves it:

Problem: In a dynamic data environment, asset attributes frequently change due to updates in business operations, regulatory requirements, or data corrections. However, manually tracking and updating these asset attributes can lead to inaccuracies, outdated information, and non-compliance with data governance standards, ultimately affecting decision-making and operational efficiency.

Solution with Workflow: An “Update Asset Attribute Workflow” in Microsoft Purview provides a streamlined solution to this problem. This workflow automates the process of updating and validating asset attributes in the data catalog whenever changes occur.

1. Triggering the Workflow: The workflow is triggered automatically whenever there is a request to update an asset’s attributes. This could be a change in the data classification, ownership details, or any other critical metadata.
2. Automated Validation Process: Once triggered, the workflow performs automated checks against predefined rules and quality criteria to ensure the updated attributes meet all necessary standards of completeness, accuracy, and consistency. This step is crucial for maintaining data integrity and compliance.
3. Review and Approval: If the updated attributes pass the validation process, they move to the review stage where designated data stewards or governance teams can assess the changes. This step provides an additional layer of scrutiny to ensure all updates align with organizational data governance policies.
4. Notification and Documentation: Upon approval, the workflow updates the asset attributes in the data catalog and automatically notifies relevant stakeholders about the changes. This ensures transparency and keeps all parties informed. Additionally, the workflow logs all changes for auditing and tracking purposes, aiding in compliance and governance reporting.
5. Escalation for Issues: If issues are detected during the validation or review stages, the workflow automatically escalates the update request back to the submitter or a designated data quality team for correction, thereby ensuring that only accurate and compliant data updates are applied.

Workflow Capabilities: Authoring, Request, Approval, and View

Workflow provides Authoring, Request Approval, and Workflow run capabilities:

• Authoring: Workflows can be created using pre-defined templates or customized to fit specific business requirements. Workflow connectors enable customization, creating tailored processes for different organizational needs. Behind the scenes, Purview uses Power Automate to trigger the workflow.

• Request and Approval: Workflows automate the generation of approval requests and the notification process. This ensures that any changes to data entities go through a validation process, meeting compliance and policy standards before implementation.

• Workflow Runs View: Administrators can monitor and manage workflow runs, tracking the status of various operations and ensuring that workflows execute as intended.

Setting Up Workflows

Prerequisites: Ensure you have the necessary permissions within Microsoft Purview.

• A new role, “Workflow Admin,” is required to manage workflows. A Workflow admin defined for a collection can create self-service workflows and bind these workflows to the collections they have access to. A Workflow admin defined for any collection can create approval workflows for the business glossary.
• To bind the glossary workflows to a term you need to have at least Data reader permissions.

Choosing a Workflow Types

There are two main types of workflows in Microsoft Purview:

1. Data Governance Workflow: This type focuses on data policy, access governance, and loss prevention. It’s scoped at the collection level and is designed to manage how data is accessed and used across the organization to ensure compliance with internal policies and external regulations.
2. Data Catalog Workflow: This workflow is centered around the management of create, update, and delete (CUD) operations for glossary terms within the data catalog. It’s scoped at the glossary level and helps maintain the integrity and relevance of the business glossary by automating the approval process for any changes made to glossary terms.

Suppose you want to manage the approval process for updating glossary terms in your organization’s data catalog. You would choose a Data Catalog Workflow. This workflow could be set up to trigger a review and approval process whenever a team member proposes changes to a glossary term, ensuring that all changes are vetted and approved by the appropriate personnel before being finalized.

Defining and Binding Workflow Scope

Workflows can be scoped at different levels, such as the entire data catalog or specific collections/glossaries, to target the workflow execution accurately. Once created, bind your workflow to the desired scope to ensure it runs for the appropriate operations within that scope.

Workflow Scope determines where in your organization’s data landscape the workflow applies. It could be scoped to the entire data catalog, specific collections within the catalog, or individual glossary terms.

Let’s say your organization wants to enforce data access policies more strictly in the sales department. You could create a Data Governance Workflow scoped to the “Sales” collection. This workflow would manage access requests to sales data, ensuring they go through an approval process before granting access. By binding this workflow to the Sales collection, any access request for sales data would automatically trigger this workflow, ensuring compliance with your organization’s data access policies.

Manage Workflow Runs

You can manage the workflow runs, Monitor the execution of workflows, manage requests and approvals, and make adjustments to optimize the workflow process​​.

You can refer to more purview-related blogs here.

Conclusion

Reflecting on our journey through the intricacies of Microsoft Purview Workflow, it’s evident that mastering this powerful tool is not merely about navigating a software solution; it’s about embarking on a transformative path toward optimal data governance and integrity. Through its sophisticated workflow capabilities, including authoring, request, approval, and comprehensive management of workflow runs, Microsoft Purview empowers organizations to automate and streamline their data management processes. This ensures not only compliance and data quality but also fosters a culture of collaboration and transparency across teams. As we conclude, it’s clear that the strategic implementation of Microsoft Purview Workflow is a cornerstone for any organization seeking to enhance its data governance framework, promising a future where data is not just managed but harnessed to drive unprecedented organizational efficiency and innovation.