Huawei Data Governance Practices and Metadata Management

Huawei, operating in over 170 countries, positions its data foundation as the core of business operations and showcases its digital transformation as an industry benchmark. The company’s vision is to bring the digital world to every person, household, and organization, building an interconnected intelligent world.

The digital transformation roadmap consists of five initiatives, with the fourth focusing on data governance and digital operations. Huawei’s data governance evolved in two phases: 2007‑2016, establishing data management organizations, policies, and quality metrics; and 2017‑present, building a unified data platform that enables data sharing, self‑service, and secure, transparent usage.

Data is classified by characteristics into internal/external, structured/unstructured, and metadata. Structured data is further divided into six categories—basic, master, transaction, report, observation, and rule data—each with specific governance methods such as change management for basic data and consistency checks for master data.

For unstructured data, Huawei adopts a feature‑extraction approach, managing both basic attributes (title, format, owner) and content‑enhanced attributes (tags, similarity search) to support large‑scale analytics.

External data management emphasizes compliance, clear responsibility, efficient flow, auditability, and controlled approval, ensuring that imported data meets legal and security requirements.

Metadata management spans the entire data value stream, addressing pain points like data invisibility and distrust. Huawei’s metadata architecture includes generation, collection, registration, and operation, providing business, technical, and operational metadata to support data consumption, services, thematic analysis, data lake transparency, and source governance.

The overall solution integrates unified standards, platforms, and governance mechanisms, enabling high‑quality metadata to drive agile development, data asset discovery, and value creation across the enterprise.