At a practical level, the goal of a business glossary should be to eliminate confusion caused by using the same term/word to mean different things. The business glossary creates a common language and understanding about business term in use in the business. This seems simple until one tries to do it! For example. let’s assume that…
In its most basic form a business glossary is a set of definitions for commonly used business terms, aggregations, etc Many organisations may start with a spreadsheet of terms. However, over time, the need to provide context to the business glossary will in most cases require the implementation of a tool, like Collibra’s Data Governance…
Over the last few month’s our local (South African) DAMA chapter has been running a number of sessions discussing data modelling. Even in these days of “unstructured data” it seems that data modelling is needed more than ever. Why do we need a data model? Strategically, a good data model will help us to determine…
When you search on Google for “Master Data Management” you’ll have to look hard for a search result that is not vendor related. Most search results will be from software vendors about tooling related to MDM. Master Data Management seems to become a synonym for the implementation of a master data hub. On a discussion forum, I…
Last week, we talked about critical data elements – data elements that help us to achieve our priorities. Given this definition, critical data elements will vary from time to time based on the selection criteria. So what are some approaches that can be used to define critical data elements? A common approach used to categorise…
I was recently involved in a conversation with a master data management implementation team at a large South African company. Like many large businesses, this particular business comprises a group of related businesses – each running semi-autonomously – but with potential synergies across and between group companies. The challenge? To identify how a centralised set…
In metadata management we often talk about dictionaries and glossaries. What is the difference and what is the relationship between these? If we look at dictionary definitions we see that a dictionary is a work in which words and terms are defined listed in alphabetical order. A glossary is a mini-dictionary – in effect an…
