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Optional Governance Mode

MarGIS

Here's a refined version focused entirely on the ArcGIS idea, without referencing Azure:

One of the biggest challenges in any mature ArcGIS Enterprise or ArcGIS Online deployment is maintaining consistent governance as the number of portal items grows. Without a mechanism to enforce metadata and classification standards, organizations often end up with incomplete item descriptions, inconsistent ownership information, missing tags, and poorly organized content, making discovery, maintenance, and governance increasingly difficult.
I would like to see ArcGIS introduce an optional governance mode that organizations can enable for their production environments. When enabled, Portal would require users to complete a predefined set of metadata fields before an item can be shared or published. Organizations could also require items to be assigned to their organizational categories as part of the same workflow, ensuring content is consistently classified and easier to discover.
This capability should remain optional so that organizations with different governance maturity levels can decide whether to enforce it. For organizations operating enterprise GIS platforms, however, it would significantly improve data quality, content management, compliance, and long-term maintainability while reducing the accumulation of poorly documented items.
With the introduction of the Item Details Assistant, Esri has already taken an important step toward simplifying metadata creation. Extending this capability with configurable metadata enforcement and mandatory organizational categorization feels like the natural next step for supporting enterprise-scale GIS governance. It would help organizations establish consistent standards from the moment content is created, rather than relying on manual audits and post-publication cleanup.

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Status: Open

Comments

MarGIS

@RPGIS

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, I really appreciate your perspective.

I completely agree that metadata and data governance can become extremely complex, especially in large enterprise GIS environments. The points you raised around schema, field ownership, lineage, application dependencies, reporting, and governance policies are all valid, and many organizations struggle to keep that information current.

My suggestion is actually much more modest than that.

The main objective isn't to create a comprehensive data governance framework inside ArcGIS Portal, but rather to prevent the portal from gradually becoming chaotic as the number of items grows. In my experience, many portals contain hundreds or even thousands of items with missing descriptions, generic titles, no meaningful tags, or no categorization at all, making it difficult for users to discover the right content.

I think requiring a minimal set of metadata such as a meaningful description, owner information, business purpose, tags, and organizational categorization would make a significant difference. It would help users understand what an item is, whether it's the right one for their needs, and who to contact if they need more information.

RPGIS

Hi @MarGIS,

It would seem like a smart idea to enforce governance of web accessible items, featuresets and tables, and a host of others especially since the scalability of data sources is equivocal to the maintenance of these sources.

However, metadata alone doesn't always pertain to the use and nature of a set source, and with the complexity and flexibility of GIS data, it becomes challenging to thoroughly manage these sources/items.

What may need to happen is to have a detailed breakdown of the following:

Indicate the schema breakdown of the dataset
1. Include which field(s) are used and for what purposes
2. Which groups edit which fields
3. What reporting mechanisms are fed by those fields
Indicate/auto update dataset source material
1. Web maps/apps/field applications that incorporate the sources
2. Which fields in the datasets are updated and by which applications
3. Frequency of updates or modifications that incorporate those data sources
4. What is the purpose for the chosen apps/maps
Symbology driven requirements
Policies that govern the overall use and structure of the data sources
Responsibility for varying data sources.

Governance gets extremely complicated the more the data sources scale or when use cases expand. Even though Esri is working diligently to create tools to help expedite the metadata information, it would still require the organization to extensively work to establish reliable and consistent policy updates to fully govern the data sources.