Personas define policies to control which users can (or cannot) take certain actions on specific assets. They address a combination of two main objectives:
- Curating the assets that are relevant to a team of users
- Controlling the actions users can take on those assets (querying data, updating metadata, etc)
Team-based personalization
Personas curate the assets that are discoverable by users, and the detailed metadata shown. In this way, users can focus on only those assets (and metadata) relevant to their role in the organization. This reduces distractions and "noise" for users.
For example, a team of marketers may only work with a few data sets and dashboards. Rather than flooding the marketers with details about every asset in your company, you want to focus their attention.
Broad-brush access control
Combined with the personalization are broad-brush access control policies. When defining the policies in a persona, you not only select the assets but also what actions users can take on those assets.
For example, your team of marketers should be able to describe their dashboards. But perhaps they should only be able to see the shared data sets that feed those dashboards, not change their descriptions or tags. You can define the persona so that they can read and write the dashboards, but only read the data sets.