Using the Data Spec Builder

What is the Data Spec Builder?

The Data Spec Builder allows you to customize your organization’s Data Spec.

By default, the Data Spec is a comprehensive questionnaire that gathers information to power your reviews. With the Data Spec Builder, you can add additional questions, pages, and custom actions. You can also edit the descriptions and context clues of pre-existing Data Spec questions.

Structure of the Data Spec Builder

To access the Data Spec Builder, visit Settings > Data Spec

Pages & Questions 

The Pages & Questions section is a key portion of the Data Spec Builder. 

The Data Spec contains six pages and several standard questions that need to be answered by any user completing a Data Spec. These standard questions cannot be edited or removed from the builder. You can, however, edit the descriptions of these standard questions and customize the context clues.

You can also add new questions directly to the existing Data Spec pages or add new pages entirely to capture important information for subsequent reviews. 

When adding new pages or questions, consider how they’ll fit into the existing Data Spec structure and whether they’ll need new pages or questions added around them.

You can decide where these questions will appear on each page by dragging and dropping them into place.

Custom Actions

As with other custom workflows, you can assign custom actions to questions within the builder. See Automating TerraTrue with custom actions to learn more about configuring custom actions.

Page/Question Description

Providing additional details in the Description section of any pages or questions is an optional but beneficial feature that allows you to provide context to those completing the Data Spec.

Settings

Taxonomy

To allow users to add new taxonomy items in-line while completing the Data Spec, you can do so on a per-question basis by selecting any standard question and checking the Allow new box.

Consent page

Depending on the type of launch, consent may not need to be tracked.  Toggle this setting to disable the Consent page and hide it from the Data Spec.

What can I do with the Data Spec Builder?

Although the Data Spec is a comprehensive questionnaire aimed at providing the critical details necessary to complete privacy reviews, we recognize teams work in unique ways and may require additional details. Here are a couple of ways customers use the Data Spec Builder to simplify this process and collect more accurate information:

Get clarity on the scope of impact

Add additional questions anywhere in the workflow. For example, adding the question, “How many data subjects will be impacted?” to the Data Subjects page helps paint a clearer picture of the level of risk that may be involved in a launch. 

Provide external context

Add an external document to the description of your question. For example, you can use this space to include a brief description of the project and a link to an external Google Doc to provide team members with more in-depth information.