Most data catalogs go stale within a quarter. The teams that prevent it do one thing before procurement.
They assign domain owners first.
The pattern I keep seeing: a team buys Atlan or Alation, the platform gets installed in 6 weeks, metadata flows in automatically. Schemas, lineage, definitions, quality metrics. Searchable.
Three months later: half the definitions are wrong, ownership fields are blank, lineage is broken on the tables that matter most. The catalog becomes another thing nobody trusts.
The teams that don’t end up here do procurement in a specific order. Owners first, tool second.
One client did it right. 10-person data team, 200 hours per month lost to “where is this data?” questions, 2-week turnaround on every analytics request. Before they signed the Atlan contract, they named a domain owner for each warehouse area: product, finance, growth, ops. Each owner committed to keeping definitions current.
Then they bought the tool. 6 weeks to deploy. Slack questions dropped 80%. Analytics turnaround went from 2 weeks to 3 days. €8K/month platform cost, €100K/year of productivity reclaimed.
The catalog worked because the documentation had owners before the platform existed. The platform was where the documentation lived, not what produced it.
If you’re evaluating a data catalog, the question to answer first is: who owns each domain, and have they agreed to maintain the docs? If you can’t name them, the catalog will go stale within a quarter regardless of which vendor you pick.
Who owns each data domain on your team? If you can’t name them in 30 seconds, the catalog comes second.