Your Data Catalogue Isn't a Catalogue. It's a Graveyard.

In every organisation I've joined, someone has shown me their data catalogue in the first week. They open a Confluence page, or a SharePoint site, or an Alation instance, and they say "here's our data catalogue" with the energy of someone showing you a new kitchen they've never cooked in.

The entries were added during a governance initiative 18 months ago. Half the definitions are placeholder text. Three of the five "data owners" have left the company. The "last updated" date is the same date on every row because someone bulk-imported a spreadsheet and never touched it again.

This is not a data catalogue. This is a snapshot of someone's good intentions, preserved in amber.

Why catalogues die

Data catalogues die because they're built as projects, not processes.

A catalogue built as a project has a start date, an end date, a launch announcement, and a gradual slide into irrelevance. Nobody owns the ongoing maintenance because "maintenance" wasn't in the project scope.

A catalogue built as a process has an owner for each domain, a trigger for when entries get updated (when a report changes, when a source system is modified, when a new team starts using the data), and a periodic review that's in someone's calendar.

The minimum viable catalogue that actually gets used

I've stopped trying to document everything. I document the things that cause the most arguments.

Every organisation has five to ten metrics that come up in every leadership meeting and mean different things to different people. "Revenue." "Active users." "Headcount." "Utilisation." These are the definitions that need to be locked down, owned, and kept current.

Start there. Get full agreement on each definition — what it includes, what it excludes, which system it comes from, who owns the call when there's a dispute. Document that. Make it the single reference people go to in the meeting when "revenue" comes up.

Once people trust the five contested definitions, they start wanting the catalogue to expand. You've built the habit. Now you have infrastructure.

Before that: you have a graveyard.