Business-Led, Not IT-Imposed
Governance programmes succeed when business teams help design them. We build with your stewards and domain owners from day one, so the model reflects how work actually happens.
About KRISID
We Build the Repository. The Governance Is Still the Hard Part.
We build KRISID, a metadata repository, and the governance practice that makes one worth having — now extended to cover the AI systems making decisions on your data.
KRISID builds a metadata repository of the same name, and does the governance work that makes one worth having. We started on the second: twenty years with enterprises that had already invested in catalogs, quality tools and governance platforms and were still finding that business users relied on spreadsheets, email threads and tribal knowledge.
The reason is almost never the technology. It is that governance was implemented for the business rather than with it. So our starting point is accountability: who owns this data, who maintains its quality, who approves changes to a business definition, who authorises access, and who reports on its health.
The product came out of that. We kept meeting organisations whose assets did not fit the shapes their catalog allowed, waiting on a vendor release to describe their own business. So we built a repository where the model that decides what may exist is a workbook rather than code — and we are candid on the product page about what it deliberately does not do.
We work across BFSI, technology, telecom, media and healthcare — sectors where data is heavily regulated, very high in volume, or both. The governance problems rhyme across them, but the obligations do not, and the difference matters in delivery.
Scale is not the gate it usually is. The same install serves a ten-thousand-asset estate and a ten-million-asset one — one service and a plain Postgres, with no extension your platform team has to approve and no cluster to stand up. Ten thousand assets is about eighty-five megabytes. A smaller organisation starts from the model we ship, bends the names to its own vocabulary in a spreadsheet, and connects a source the same afternoon; a large one does the same thing with more domains and more approvals. Nobody is configuring their way around a model built for somebody else's business, and nobody is buying capacity for an estate they do not have.
Technology can record ownership. Governance makes ownership meaningful.
Who you would be working with
The Person Behind It
A product sold into regulated industries should say who built it. Twenty years of governance delivery sits behind KRISID — most of it spent inside the kind of organisation it is built for, and a good deal of it watching smaller ones be priced out of the same capability.
Shantanu Das
Founder & CEO
Twenty years in data management and governance, beginning in 2006. Before founding KRISID he was Data Governance Practice Lead at EPAM Systems, and before that Vice President and IT Owner for data governance at Swiss Re — two years inside a global reinsurer, which is where a good deal of this product's thinking about assets that do not fit a fixed model comes from.
He consulted on governance frameworks and operating models at PwC India, and spent nearly seven years at Cognizant — leading its Collibra and IBM IGC centre of excellence from Dublin, then running its data governance community of practice alongside client delivery.
The first decade was telecom revenue assurance and fraud management, at Ericsson, Connectiva Systems and Bhuma, delivered from Kuwait, Kenya, Tunisia and India, after starting out building data applications at Hewlett Packard. That is where the instinct about data quality comes from: systems where a wrong number is money, and somebody notices the same week.
He writes the white papers on this site, and he is who you get on a call.
Why He Built It
“Twenty years in, the thing I could not stop noticing was who gets left out. Governance has been priced as though only the largest organisations deserve it. A mid-sized insurer, a regional bank, a hospital group, a growing analytics team — each carries the same obligations, the same need to know what a figure means and who answers for it, and a fraction of the budget that pricing assumes. So they go without. The work falls to spreadsheets and to the memory of whoever has been there longest, and everybody involved knows it is not good enough.
That is what KRISID is for. The size of your organisation should decide how much of it you use — not whether you can use it at all. One licence covers the installation rather than the seats, so cataloguing more of your estate never costs more, and the people who most need to read the catalogue are never the ones priced out of reading it.
What I was not willing to do was make it a smaller product in order to make it an affordable one. Accessible had to mean the same job, done properly.”
KRISID was co-founded with Sangita Das, a solution architect with fifteen years at Ericsson behind her. The two first worked together at Connectiva Systems in 2008 — a long time to have been arguing about the same problems before building something around them.
What we believe
The Principles We Work By
Accountability Before Automation
Assigning a name in a governance tool is not ownership. We define responsibilities people understand and can execute, then automate the parts that deserve automating.
Quick Wins Earn the Mandate
We sequence work so the business feels benefit early. Credibility gained in the first quarter is what funds the rest of the programme.
Governance Should Reduce Risk, Not Add Bureaucracy
If a control does not measurably lower risk or raise confidence, it should not exist. Good governance gives the business the confidence to move faster.
AI-Readiness Is a Governance Problem
AI initiatives inherit whatever data quality and ownership you already have. Governing data well is the cheapest AI investment most organisations can make.
Build to Hand Over
We measure success by whether the programme still runs after we leave. Enablement and documentation are part of delivery, not an afterthought.
We Ship What We Can Prove
Every claim the product makes is checked by its own regression suite, and its documentation carries a section on what it deliberately does not do. Governance software that overstates itself is the problem it claims to solve.
Your Data Stays Yours
KRISID installs in your account, against your database. Metadata about regulated data is often regulated itself, and we would rather not be in the chain of custody.
How you know it's working
Five Signs Your Governance Programme Is Creating Real Value
Governance is not measured by the number of policies published or workflows deployed. It is measured by whether people incorporate it into their daily work without being asked.
- Business users can discover and understand trusted data on their own.
- Data ownership is clear, with accountable stewards across every domain.
- Quality issues are identified, prioritised and resolved through a defined process.
- Lineage gives transparency from source to consumption, raising confidence in reporting and AI.
- Governance supports innovation by reducing risk rather than creating friction.
Expertise
Platforms and Disciplines We Work Across
Our own repository first, then the platforms our clients have already bought. We would rather tell you the one you own is the right answer than sell you a migration.
KRISID
Our own metadata repository. A configurable metamodel you change in a spreadsheet, harvesting from six sources, lineage at three grains, responsibility that inherits and approvals you declare on a canvas — installed in your own account, on a plain Postgres. It runs the same way for a ten-thousand-asset estate as for a ten-million-asset one, so the size of your organisation decides how much of it you use, not whether you can. Because we wrote it, we can change how it works rather than filing a feature request.
Collibra
Catalog, lineage, policy manager, protect, Data Marketplace, Edge and BPMN workflows.
Microsoft Purview
Data map, classification, sensitivity labels, compliance and Azure-native lineage.
Informatica CDGC
Scanners, curation, glossary, stewardship and cloud-native governance operations.
Atlan
Active metadata, personas and purposes, column-level lineage and embedded governance workflows.
Alation
Usage-driven discovery, query log analysis, trust flags, glossary and policy centre.
AI & Agent Governance
Agent registries, authority models, approval gates, monitoring and model lineage.
Let's Talk About Where You're Stuck
No pitch deck. A conversation about your current state, and an honest view of what it would take to fix it — or sign in to the sandbox and form your own view first.