Mastering One Business Language
Imagine that you are an employee at the marketing department of a global clothing company called DressWell. Higher level management from the finance department asks you to create insights on how many customers recently bought clothes on your online website. Knowing you can complete this task easily, even though it will take a bit of time, you start working on creating an analytics and insights dashboard that presents the amounts of customers that visited your website and the percentage that actually ordered items after adding clothes to their carts. Proudly, you show your manager the dashboard when it is finished. However, your manager was tasked by the finance department to map these customers. Therefore, he did not only want an overview of customers that ordered through your website, but he also wanted an included overview of customers that returned their complete order, as they cannot be viewed as customers. The same applies for customers that chose to pay with an afterpay method; you included the customers in your dashboard that did not complete their payment as well. These people are not considered customers by the finance department as their payment is not finished. This confusion surrounding the definition of a customer causes your dashboard to be rejected by your manager, while you have to start again with this new and additional information.
The problem in this scenario could have easily been avoided if a customer was properly defined for each department. However, there might be more severe consequences if you are operating in different branches, such as government, insurance companies, and healthcare. To avoid this, companies might consider implementing a business glossary, which enables a consistent language throughout the organisation as a whole. When a business glossary across the whole company would have been used in the example described above, the term ‘customer’ would have been specified, causing no inconsistencies or differences in definitions between the different departments. Another possibility is to create specified business glossaries for every department. This way, when tasked with such a task, you would have known which glossary and customer definition to use.
Implementing A Business Glossary
Some things to consider when implementing a business glossary is the searchability of it. Ensure that your business glossary is arranged in the same way as the organisational structure of your company. This avoids user confusion and increases searchability. Additionally, keep trach of lifecycle management of the so-called ‘business terms’, as definitions might change over time. By keeping track of changes, one single language is always maintained throughout the organisation. Assign stewards that keep track of these changes and consider (partially) opening the business glossary for all employees. This way, employees can spot the mistakes and inconsistencies and subsequently correct them quickly.
Do you think a business glossary would be beneficial for your organisation? Download our factsheet that can help you start implementing your own business glossary! Feel free to reach out to us if something is not clear or you would like some advice.
