Business Glossaries

What is a Business Glossary?

A business glossary is a place that brings together terms used across the organisation and defines them is a common, consistent and precise language.

A centralised business glossary can be considered a search engine for data understanding and will contain a logical and physical data layer, the logical layer will detail the data at a business user level and the physical data layer will detail the field names and other physical data attributes.

Why add a Business Glossary?

Organisations have many disparate systems containing data that is very similar or data that should be same, without a definitive dictionary of terms used across an organisation, the chances of ambiguous information being used increases.

A business glossary allows all users in the organisation to understand the agreed upon meaning of business terms.

Information Commonly Stored:

• Terms
• Acronyms
• Abbreviations
• Definitions
• Descriptions
• Supporting or Related Terms

Benefits:

• Significant savings through simplification, elimination and reduced errors.
• Ease of Access
• Increased Consistency
• Higher Data Quality
• Reduced Data Remediation.

Below is an example of what a data element looks like in a Business Glossary.