When a senior executive challenges a number, the meeting does not pause so everyone can open a lineage tool, inspect a dependency graph, and trace SQL.
That is not how trust works at the executive level.
The CFO is not asking for a prettier diagram. They are asking for an answer. They want to know where the number came from, what logic produced it, and whether they should trust it. And they want that answer quickly, accurately, and in plain language.
That is why I think the current state of the art in data glossary and data lineage is fundamentally transitory. The graph matters. The catalog matters. The metadata matters. But none of those is the destination. They are ingredients. The destination is an interface that can answer the question directly and back that answer with evidence.
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