Business Glossary & Terms: Best Practices

In Information Governance, a Business Glossary contains a set of business Terms as defined by the organization.

The benefits of establishing a well-constructed business glossary include:

• Reduced semantic confusion across the enterprise
• Improved business understanding, use, and reuse of impacted data
• Mutual understanding of changes to business policies and technical rules.

But simply providing a term definition does not guarantee the elimination of semantic confusion, nor does it maximize the potential value of a well defined term. Poorly defined terms can add to semantic confusion - rather than reducing it. So how does one know the difference between a well defined term, and a poorly defined term? 

Apply Definition Standards

A well defined term should adhere to specific definition standards. These standards should contribute to the unambiguous understanding of each term. The below recommendations can be leveraged as a "checklist" for establishing organization-wide consistency: 

1. The term and its definition should be stated in the singular. An exception is if the word concept itself is plural by nature (think “scissors” or “trousers”).
2. The definition should only state what the concept is, rather than stating what it is not.
3. The definition should not contain any abbreviations.This is because acronyms and abbreviations may overlap across terms or concepts.
4. The definition should be comprised of complete grammatical sentences and use proper capitalization rules.
5. The definition should not embed a definition of other related terms. The second term should be defined on its own and referenced within the definition of the primary term.
6. Any secondary terms referenced in a definition should also be defined and pass definition standards.
7. A term definition should be brief and comprehensive. It should be unambiguous and allow only one interpretation.

Make it Legitimate

The Right People

A common myth is that the business glossary is owned by the IT department. Ideally, the glossary should be created and maintained by the business staff - thus to improve business understanding and use of data. Business experts and relevant stakeholders should be tasked with defining terms, or at minimum endorse or contest the proposed definitions.

Politics

This process will inevitably identify the various definitions associated with specific terms. If there are valid business requirements for differing definitions, the best approach might be to rename terms to highlight these distinctions. Moving to universal definitions can require a high level of negotiation and potentially unwarranted organizational politics, as well as significant time delays.

Supporting Documentation & Relevancy

Add authoritative documentation to support term definitions. Make terms relevant by aligning to other business terms, business policies, rules, systems, and data sets, and to specific goals and initiatives planned at the company and program levels.

Final Thoughts

Information Governance can be complicated to implement, but yields important benefits. At Syniti, each cloud customer is assigned a designated Customer Success Manager who can help guide you and provide further expertise on implementations. To learn more about the Syniti customer success program, please contact customersuccess@syniti.com.

Note: For technical guidance on the creation of terms, please visit the Help link available at the bottom of any Syniti Cloud page.