Alation Introduces Critical Data Element Manager to Deliver Agentic Governance for Business-Critical Data

London — November 12, 2025 — Alation Inc., the data intelligence company, today announced Alation CDE Manager, a dedicated solution to govern Critical Data Elements (CDEs) at scale, at revAlation London. CDE Manager empowers organizations to govern data based on the business outcome they want to achieve, uniting business, risk, and data teams with purpose-built AI agents that translate policy intent into actionable standards and continuously ensure compliance.

As organizations face mounting regulatory pressure and AI-driven risk, the need for trusted data has never been greater. Yet many businesses and governance teams struggle to prioritize what matters most, getting lost in an infinite sea of requirements, technology, and data. These teams spend enormous amounts of time and effort across their datasets without a clear connection to business value. Critical Data Elements (CDEs) offer a practical approach to governing the most essential data for operations, reporting, risk management, and compliance.  Even still, managing CDEs has become inordinately expensive and complex.

Regulatory mandates, operational risk, and data-driven decision-making all hinge on the same question: Can you trust the data that matters most? Yet business, risk, and data teams often operate in silos, each speaking different languages — policy and control frameworks on one side, technical metadata and data quality metrics on the other. Compounding the problem, meaningful progress requires collecting and analyzing detailed information about the data, including definitions, lineage, ownership, quality metrics, and controls— an effort so complex and resource-intensive that it often stalls before results can be realized.

Alation CDE Manager uses AI-powered declarative governance agents to translate the language of risk and compliance into measurable data management standards, bridging the gap between these worlds. The agents draft standards, semantically map CDEs across the data ecosystem, and automatically monitor their compliance, improving the quality, consistency, and scalability of governance programs.

"The goal of the data governance program is to build trust in our data so it can be confidently used to deliver real business value,” said Alistair Griffin, Global Data Governance Lead at Brambles. “I can see huge potential for CDE Manager as a powerful, intuitive tool that helps us govern the data that drives our business, bringing key indicators for our most important data into one place and allowing us to manage the process in a realistically achievable way. I am genuinely excited for this module!”

“One of the standout capabilities of Alation CDE Manager is how effortlessly it extracts and formats the information we need,” said Reece Offer, Data Governance Analyst at HBF Health Limited. “It’s streamlined our workflows and saved a huge amount of time.”

Key Capabilities of Alation CDE Manager include:

• Policy-as-Code: Automatically translate business policies and risk controls into measurable standards and executable rules with purpose-built agents, bridging the gap between intent and enforcement.

• Semantic Mapping: AI Agents semantically map CDEs to data assets across the catalog, lineage, and data quality layers, ensuring each CDE is contextualized and continuously governed.

• Continuous Compliance: Monitor quality and attestation automatically as AI agents surface compliance evidence and exceptions in real time.

• Unified View: Embedded in Alation, CDE Manager connects policies, glossary terms, and data lineage to create a single, audit-ready view of each CDE’s health and ownership.

• Interoperability by Design: Part of Alation’s network of declarative governance agents, CDE Manager integrates seamlessly with curation and data quality automations to operationalize governance at scale.

“Enterprises don’t fail at governance because of intent — they fail because they can’t translate intent into scalable, effective data management the whole organization understands,” said GT Volpe, Sr. Director of Product Management at Alation. “CDE Manager bridges that gap, bringing together business, risk, and data teams by turning policies and controls into actionable data standards. With intelligent agents that map, monitor, and manage CDEs, organizations can finally scale governance with consistency, quality, and proof.”

Alation CDE Manager is currently in private beta and is scheduled to be generally available later this year. Organizations interested in participating can contact Alation to join the beta program.

Learn more:

• Read the blog, Introducing Alation CDE Manager: Stop Drowning in Data Governance Busywork