Intraversed myth busting:
Your business glossary is there to serve your data management

ESTIMATED READING TIME: 2 MINUTES

Why People Believe the Myth

Glossaries are usually managed by data governance teams under IT.

Glossaries usually arise out of data and analytics, and business intelligence projects.

Business glossaries are often packaged with Data Management software.

The Problem with the Myth

Business glossaries contain business terms — the real-world language used by business staff to talk about business processes, concepts and metrics. Defining this language can only be done by business staff. Not IT staff.

When IT and data management needs are driving the glossary definition writing, a few things can happen that will both undermine the effectiveness of the glossary AND the data management it's trying to support:

1. The assumption is often made by data management tool vendors that a data item has a one-to-one relationship with a business term. This simplified view is to help data management teams search their data dictionaries and ignores that reality is often a lot more complicated.

2. Business staff are given a list of terms created by the system designers to define, as if that's what the business can and should be doing. It's not the language they should be defining. Business terms arise from business activity and processes. Business staff should define those – and only business staff can successfully define those. Then it's IT's job to look at the data side and match the business language to data items (if appropriate) OR, ideally, align the data processing to the business language.

3. Business staff are expected to use data management technology to write and manage definitions. Not only are these platforms often too technical for most business staff to successfully navigate and understand, the glossary itself is seen as an IT tool, not a business tool. This means business staff are less engaged, as they don't see a direct benefit to their work. The truth is, a business-driven glossary has huge benefit for business staff. We've written about that here.

What We Suggest Instead of Following This Myth

Data management exists to support business operations and needs the engagement of the business community. Our best practice steps based on our extensive experience to achieve this:

1. Establish glossary governance as a business function and drive the glossary content authoring against business priorities.

2. Analyse the business requirements for a business glossary and definition life-cycle management (not the technical requirements of a the DM glossary) and find a suitable solution.

3. Make the business glossary the source of truth for all staff and integrate its content with the DM tools to support data governance.

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Our award-winning Intralign Ecosystem methodology establishes business-side managed glossaries through education, software and expert mentoring & support. Learn more here.

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