A business term can hold many meanings depending on the context and the users experience, department or familiarity with the business.
A common language across departments or business units is a simple concept but one many businesses struggle to achieve. The perceived challenge - trying to collect business terms, having a system to store them in, assigning stewards and working through the review process to come to a consensus on each term - seems too great. Of course this perspective can be quickly overcome, when one takes full account of the quite serious issues all business & IT users encounter in miscommunications, misunderstandings and misjudgements.
The creation of a common set of business terms associated with the key business functions, operations and KPI’s can remove the ambiguity and ensure all parts of the business share information accurately and in context.
Focus are highly experienced in assisting enterprises to create a common language that can be agreed, defined, used and evolved collaboratively. For example, we assist clients to identify and consolidate business terms using the purpose-built, mature, metadata tool, IBM Business Glossary. Terms can be assigned to a “Data Steward” for revision to be accepted or deprecated and replaced with a more appropriate term. Terms can then be linked with other related terms, homonyms, synonyms, old (deprecated) terms, then utilised by business and technical users across the various information assets - BI Reports, Dashboards, database tables or ETL jobs.
This Solution can be a valuable first step in a Data Governance process that empowers the enterprise with reliable, trusted information.