Playbook
Auditors want column-level lineage and we can't produce it
A financial-services CDO is preparing for a regulatory review. The auditor has asked for column-level lineage of every regulatory reporting figure — from the source system, through every transformation, to the report. The current catalogue is partial, lineage is informal, and the data team is spending weeks rebuilding flows by hand.
Trigger — Regulator request; lineage cannot be produced on demand.
Good outcome — When the regulator asks where a number came from, the customer can trace it column by column from report back to source in minutes. Every data product has a named owner.