What Is A Business Glossary? | IDERA Data University

A business glossary is an enterprise-wide document listing business terms and definitions. They are built as part of data governance initiatives to ensure a consistent understanding of business terms throughout the enterprise.

Building business glossaries is made easier with the right tools. For example, with ER/Studio, organizations can harvest business terms from existing data models, directly. This not only saves time, but guarantees business terms are recorded accurately and consistently.

With ER/Studio, the harvesting works both ways, so models can be built more easily by harvesting terms from an existing glossary.

Now supporting a purpose-built integration with Collibra, ER/Studio is the data-driven enterprises answer to data modeling and data governance.

You can learn more about ER/Studio solutions: https://www.idera.com/er-studio-enterprise-architecture-solutions

Learn more about the Collibra integration and building business glossary with ER/Studio: https://www.idera.com/products/er-studio/collibra-integration

With everybody working from the same definitions and from the same page, organizations can make effective use of enterprise data resources.

Other useful resources:
What Is a Business Glossary (Blog):

What Is Business Glossary Management?: https://community.idera.com/database-tools/blog/b/community_blog/posts/what-is-business-glossary-management

What Is a Data Ontology?: https://community.idera.com/database-tools/blog/b/community_blog

Building a Business Glossary: https://community.idera.com/database-tools/blog/b/community_blog/posts/building-a-business-glossary-7-step-guide

Business Glossary Best Practices: https://community.idera.com/database-tools/blog/b/community_blog/posts/business-glossary-best-practices-dos-and-donts

Top 5 Benefits of Business Glossary Management: https://community.idera.com/database-tools/blog/b/community_blog/posts/top-five-benefits-of-business-glossary-management

Transcript
Business glossaries are a collection of business terms - along with definitions and ontological & taxonomic relationships - documented for data governance initiatives.

Why You Need a Business Glossary

Imagine a choir. To harmonize, everyone needs the same hymn sheet and homogenous understanding of its content. A note can’t read “C-sharp” to one singer and “B-flat” to another. It must be consistent.

And consistency is what business glossaries address.

Consider the amount of data stored by modern enterprises. Effective data governance requires applying rules to data based on well-informed categorization with input from around the enterprise.

For example, one department might consider a “Customer” to be the company that purchased a product or service.
This is common in Support departments.

Another department might consider customers to be individuals. If the data governance initiative was only aware of the company-level definition of “Customer" then sensitive customer data referring to individuals could be mislabeled and exposed.

Business Glossaries establish consistent definitions of business terms - negating ambiguity.

They’re essential for implementing and maintaining data governance and ensuring everyone is singing from the
same hymn sheet.