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Governance Action

A governance action describes a specific invocation of a governance service that needs to be performed on one or more metadata elements, or their counterparts in the digital landscape.

A governance action is represented by a GovernanceAction entity in the open metadata ecosystem. It contains details such as:

It is linked to:

  • The source (cause) of the governance action, such as an incident report.
  • Any additional target elements that need to be acted upon.

This GovernanceAction metadata entity is used to coordinate the desired activity in the governance engine, record its current state and act as a record of the activity for future audits.

Governance actions can be created through the Governance Engine OMAS API. Some governance services (for example, the Watchdog Governance Action Service) can initiate other governance actions.

Governance services produce output strings called guards that indicate specific conditions or outcomes. These guards can be used to trigger new governance actions. Triggered governance actions are linked to their predecessor, so it is possible to trace through the governance actions that ran.

The governance action process defines the flow of governance actions. It uses governance action types to build up a template of possible governance actions linked via the guards. When the process runs, its linked governance action types control the triggering of new governance actions.

If the start date of the governance action is in the future, the Engine Host Services running in the same Engine Host OMAG Server as the nominated governance engine will schedule the governance service to run soon after the requested start date. If the start date is left blank, the requested governance service is run as soon as possible.

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