Why Promulga exists

The context

In data governance programmes, the first deliverables are documents: a data governance policy, data quality standards, roles and responsibilities, procedures for access, retention or incident management. They are written by business experts, reviewed by peers, approved by a board, and must be known by everybody, and reviewed every year.

On every assignment the same question came back: where do these documents live, and how do we run their life cycle? The answers were a shared folder and a spreadsheet, a SharePoint library with a flow nobody dared to touch, or an expensive product the client could not justify for a few dozen documents.

The goal

Make the governance of governance documents (Governance²) simple enough for Data Owners, rigorous enough for auditors, and affordable for any organisation.

Promulga fixes the process that frameworks such as DAMA-DMBOK, ISO 27001 or NIS2 expect, keeps Word as the writing tool, and produces the evidence: who wrote, who reviewed, who approved, which version is in force, who read it.

Why no existing solution was satisfying

• Collaboration suites (SharePoint, Google Workspace) are excellent for writing together, but the governance process (deadlines, reminders, approvals, official publication) has to be built and maintained, and is rarely documented itself.
• Policy management products do the job, but at a licence cost and a platform dependency that small and mid-sized organisations, or a single department, cannot justify.
• Enterprise content management platforms are powerful and heavy: they need specialists to operate and to model the process.
• Most options keep your governance documents in someone else's cloud, which matters for public bodies and regulated sectors.

Hence Promulga: a small, self-hosted application that does one thing well. It started as a Google Sheets and Apps Script prototype, then became an independent application.

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