GOVERNANCE FRAMEWORKS

A business glossary provides a list of terms that are important to a specific business. The glossary should be unique in its terms and definitions to ensure its completeness and accuracy. Through listing the definitions, examples, synonyms, and so on of specific terms, individuals throughout various departments of a business will be able to communicate without issue.

A business glossary will prove especially beneficial when dealing with communication between IT personnel and customer service, or web developers and a sales manager. A glossary will help ensure all team members are on the same page without employees having to repeatedly explain terms to one another and draw out different versions of a definition. The glossary keeps definitions consistent and puts them in an easy-to-reference location, saving everyone time. Moreover, when a dedicated tool is used to capture the business terms, it is often linked to a data dictionary and this helps IT better connect the business metadata to the technical metadata.

Whenever a business has multiple departments, it is common for each branch of employees to define their own sect of terminology. However, this can cause disruption and misunderstanding. A business glossary is available and implemented as part of the policies and procedures, it prevents the silo effect and creates an effective form of collective workflow.

An effective business glossary will be routinely updated with new content, which should be verified and approved. Whether the business owner or an appointed individual or third party completes this final check of accuracy, the approval process establishes ownership and safeguards the legitimacy of the information. The beneficial downstream effect is that this ownership often rolls over into business ownership over data quality requirements, data stewardship, process management, and so on, over the same business and data domain.

When all team members understand the terms and definitions of the business glossary, they are better equipped to make informed decisions, and complete tasks with confidence, which increases overall productivity.

Conversely, when all parties involved have easy access to the business glossary, as well as a mutual understanding of the terms and how they correlate with various data points and metrics, it reduces errors and delays on how data should be transformed into information.