Business Semantics Glossary

‘Truly embraces the core challenges in a glossary’Enterprise Data Architect at a large insurance firm.

Create transparency and alignment

An important first step in a Data Governance initiative is the identification and prioritization of critical data assets: what are your business goals and which critical business elements and attributes are related to those goals? One has to agree on the meaning of those key business elements and critical attributes, as they mean different things depending on their context.

Once those are identified you can establish their origins and use: which data elements are involved, where does that data come from and where is it used? This traceability is fundamental in your Data Governance initiative: you can only control what you can identify.

Use-cases

Business Glossary

Different terms mean different things depending on the context. For example: Is “Customer” the same for Finance as it is for Sales? Do the same rules apply? What are the policies? Which underlying business objectives are they representing? Who are the owners, stewards and stakeholders?

A business glossary is a key component to tackle the questions above. The collaborative and iterative creation of such an inventory is a mandatory first task for the core data governance team. Once this process is up and running you have a solid foundation to move data governance forward.

Data Directory

A true data directory also includes technical metadata: which fields, columns and records are out there, and what do they mean? What is the type of the data element, and is there a limit on the length? In which system or application is the field contained? What data structures is it part of?

Features

Search Everywhere

Collibra's Business Semantics Glossary comes with its "Search Everywhere" application, which provides end users with accessibility to the glossary from any Windows application. No more: "what does this number on the report mean" or "what should I put in this field on the screen?". Simply hit a hot key and see what the meaning is.

Ownership & responsibility

Easily determine ownership at an organizational level (e.g., the "Customer Domain" is owned by "Sales"). Organize your responsibilities and assign out of the box and custom roles so all stakeholders are identified and can be involved at the right time.

Templating

Use any of Collibra's out of the box templates (e.g., Business Term, Data Attribute, ...) or easily set up your own. The Business Semantics Glossary is highly configurable because of its flexible semantic metamodel. You can efficiently set up your own types (e.g., Sales Term) and configure it with attributes (e.g., Definition, Purpose, ...) and relations (e.g., source system, used in, ...). These configurations are grouped in templates to keep everything extremely usable: both for the end users that will populate them as for the people that manage the set up. You can organize the templates as you require (e.g., different Business Term templates for Sales and Finance).

Collaboration & workflow

Collibra's Business Semantics Glossary is a business friendly, collaborative platform. Based on their role users can provide input, reviews, comments, proposals, ... To keep this manageable the software has a built in workflow engine (with out of the box and configurable workflows). This way you the platform helps you to reach out to the right stakeholders at the right time (and make sure it is easy to follow up on any open items).

Control & track changes

Any change that users make in Collibra's Business Semantics Glossary is versioned and tracked. This way people can easily see what changes were made, by who and when. This provides decision makers with context specific history of all changes.

Hierarchy Management & Semantic Modelling

Collibra's Business Semantics Glossary is semantics-enabled: next to plain attributes (e.g., Definition) you can also set up typed attributes and establish meaning relations between assets. Build single- or multidimensional hierarchies across organizational dimensions.

Import & export

When it comes to Business Glossary and Data Dictionary users already have a lot of material handy, very often in spreadsheets on shared drives. With Collibra's Business Semantics Glossary it is extremely easy for end users to import their content. In just a couple of minutes and a few steps in the import wizard their material is in the platform where it is easy to manage and stakeholders can collaborate on it, and most importantly where it is readily accessible for any user in the organization (i.e. via the web browser or through the Search Everywhere).

Traceability

Collibra's Business Semantics Glossary has built in traceability to help stewards understand the impact when they make changes. These impacts and data flows can be visualized so users can drill down in their analysis. Next to the answer to the "what" question (i.e. what is impacted), Collibra's platform also answers the "who" question: who is impacted (e.g., an owner of an impacted report) and where should they be involved (e.g., as stakeholders in the process).

Mapping

Mapping is one of those inevitable activities: which data element maps to which other data element (e.g., in data integration)? Which data set is used in which activity and how does the data flow? Which parties are involved in the mapping specification, and which agreements and data elements are relevant? Time to get this out of the spreadsheet: in Collibra's Business Semantics Glossary you can easily establish and manage those mappings.