Intraversed myth busting:
It's too hard to align common terms

ESTIMATED READING TIME: 2 MINUTES

The Myth

Building consensus for organisation-wide common terminology is too hard or even impossible. We must just deal with the issues caused by ambiguity.

Why People Believe the Myth

We've touched on this in our last blog about the number of stakeholders needed. It's generally believed that the task of corralling the business folk and aligning their understanding is pointless because different departments have completely different meanings for those terms.

The Problem with the Myth

Common terms within organisations, such as student, customer, and employee, have different meanings and numerical counts for reporting that depend on the context of their use. Without revealing this understanding, reported numbers can be unreliable.

What We Suggest Instead of this Myth

We disagree that it's too hard to build consensus and have, for many years, successfully aligned the understanding and use of common terms within organisations, leading them to qualify these terms according to context.

For example, a university had miscounted their student enrolment, which caused a loss of about 15% of revenue. Using our workshop method, we successfully aligned the understanding of terms throughout the "student" life cycle—and gained agreement with stakeholders from across the university for the use of appropriately qualified terminology, for example, "applicant" versus "admitted student" versus "enrolled student". This was especially important for communicating with the data and analytics group to prevent a repeat of the miscount for "student" numbers.

So, What is this Workshop Method?

I've written before on workshops versus one-on-one interviews and how workshops are the only way to gain consensus. But we also have a [not so] secret weapon; we use the Intralign structured definition standard as a means of focusing the workshop attendees on key aspects of the definition—the classification of the term and its purpose. This creates discourse that allows knowledge sharing—who uses the term, for what purpose, and why—and exposes the risk caused by misunderstanding or conflicting use of the term.

We love seeing those "light-bulb moments" when the stakeholders enthusiastically agree on the use of "qualifiers" in the term—adjectives applied to the term name that clarify the context and differentiate it from the core term. For example, "customer" account versus "billing" account.

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Want to know more? This topic and many others are covered in our book Data Governance Needs Risk Management, from Data-driven to Business-driven. You can find out more here.

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