Improve responsibility and ownership

The Business Semantics Glossary and its contents is a business friendly instrument, accessed through the browser. The product supports you in assigning roles, responsibilities and ownership of both people and business functions (sales & marketing, finance, ...) in the context of your Data Governance program. Ownership and accountability are critical towards creating trustworthy data. Creating a business friendly environment in terms of access and usability facilitates business ownership.

Improve interoperability

Interoperability is not achieved by connecting bits of data together - it requires a good understanding of the different parts involved, including their commonalities and differences. This starts at the business level, where different business units might have a different understanding of what "Customer" actually means. By specifying at the business level you avoid high-risk complexity and data governance issues downstream.

The basis for interoperability is an easy to use and semantically detailed Business Glossary, providing clarity and understanding. The Semantic Modelling capabilities add formality and consistency, and can serve as a basis in a Model Driven Architecture to support forward engineering. By starting from aligned definitions, business concepts and rules, it is easier, more efficient and less costly to enable interoperability as compared to digging through application logic, databases, code tables and outdated spreadsheets.

Align business and technical users

By extending the Business Glossary with additional semantics, you are building a tangible bridge between business and IT,. While Business people specify their business definitions, information analysts add and find what they need for their work within IT projects (e.g., classifications, taxonomy and rules for Master Data Management, Data Integration, Business Intelligence, ...).

As a result, anyone can contribute to the organization’s business semantics. More formal parts (e.g., business rules) are verbalized in natural language so that they can be read, understood and validated by all domain experts. Social and organizational aspects (e.g., which user created what and when) help the end user in identifying experts and owners. Locating information you already know is easy thanks to advanced search functionality.