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Disclaimer: "The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions."
It would help a lot if we start from understanding the problem better.
The vocabulary of business folks, in any organization, is vastly different from the one used by its IT department. Business guys talk policies, rules, ideas and business terminology etc., while the IT folks talk source and target systems, tables, fields, structures, attributes, derivations, and dependencies etc.
Often both can't understand each others and this situation is quite understandable. The common practice is to create an internal vocabulary in each organization to overcome this situation. This would typically have the business terminology they use with definitions and explanations. This would be generally shared among the important people and seldom with everyone across organization. Generally, these vocabularies are maintained in spread sheets. There could be many versions of these lying around. It may not be reasonable to expect all these versions to be in sync and up to date.
In such situation let us assume a finance manager requests the IT to provide some sales figures. First, the IT folks may try to refer to the internal vocabulary, which may or may not exists. Even if it is available, the particular details that are required may not be defined, or defined in some other version of the vocabulary which may not be accessible. Even if the definition is available it may not be clear which data sources/structures could provide the required details.
Add to the complexity, the particular terms mentioned by the finance manager may have different meanings across various business units in the organization, which is not so uncommon. It may not be surprising if the whole process of understanding the request and providing the requested details could take few weeks if not months. At times, the request goes unserviced too due to lack of technical details.
The result could be as severe as loosing edge out to the competitor, it could be worse too. In these days of fierce competition it is mandatory to act fast enough to stay ahead of competition. That requires faster accesses to the information which provides the ability to make informed business decisions. If the Finance manager, in the above example, could get the required details on time she/he could take the required actions on time.
In the following posts we try to observe how Business Glossary addresses these issues.
Disclaimer: "The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions."
It would help a lot if we start from understanding the problem better.
The vocabulary of business folks, in any organization, is vastly different from the one used by its IT department. Business guys talk policies, rules, ideas and business terminology etc., while the IT folks talk source and target systems, tables, fields, structures, attributes, derivations, and dependencies etc.
Often both can't understand each others and this situation is quite understandable. The common practice is to create an internal vocabulary in each organization to overcome this situation. This would typically have the business terminology they use with definitions and explanations. This would be generally shared among the important people and seldom with everyone across organization. Generally, these vocabularies are maintained in spread sheets. There could be many versions of these lying around. It may not be reasonable to expect all these versions to be in sync and up to date.
In such situation let us assume a finance manager requests the IT to provide some sales figures. First, the IT folks may try to refer to the internal vocabulary, which may or may not exists. Even if it is available, the particular details that are required may not be defined, or defined in some other version of the vocabulary which may not be accessible. Even if the definition is available it may not be clear which data sources/structures could provide the required details.
Add to the complexity, the particular terms mentioned by the finance manager may have different meanings across various business units in the organization, which is not so uncommon. It may not be surprising if the whole process of understanding the request and providing the requested details could take few weeks if not months. At times, the request goes unserviced too due to lack of technical details.
The result could be as severe as loosing edge out to the competitor, it could be worse too. In these days of fierce competition it is mandatory to act fast enough to stay ahead of competition. That requires faster accesses to the information which provides the ability to make informed business decisions. If the Finance manager, in the above example, could get the required details on time she/he could take the required actions on time.
In the following posts we try to observe how Business Glossary addresses these issues.
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