Using Business Glossaries
A business glossary is a managed vocabulary of business terms and concepts that can be used across your department or organization. A business glossary is organized in the hierarchy of categories, sub categories, and terms.
Business concepts are common across teams or departments in an organization. When such common concepts are managed and organized formally through a business glossary, the teams within an organization are enabled to collaborate better and use the same vocabulary.
For example, Subscription ID can be added as a glossary term in an enterprise cloud organization and can be defined as follows:
Subscription ID (Sub ID) is a unique identifier that associates the customer subscription to their provisioned instance. The Sub ID remains the same for transaction events over the life of a customer's subscription (renewals, expansion, and rebills). An order, contract, or subscription plan can have multiple Sub IDs to represent multiple provisioned instances.
For information about how you manage a business glossary in your organization, see Managing a Business Glossary.
Benefits of Using a Business Glossary
- A formally managed glossary helps you understand the business concepts better, promotes common understanding and collaboration across teams.
- You can link terms to physical objects and get a comprehensive view of the business concept or the meaning of a field. While a physical object is typically liked to one term, a term can be linked to multiple objects at a time. For more information, see Linking Glossary terms to Data Objects.
- A glossary allows you to organize related information assets in a logical hierarchy.
- Use the business glossary as a navigation mechanism for hierarchies. For example, you can use a glossary as a logical structure to group objects for each department.
Owners of Business Glossaries
In an organization, the data stewards or the data governance teams manage the glossary content. The data stewards work across teams to define and approve the hierarchy of the terms. The glossary content of an organization can range from hundreds to thousands of terms spread across hierarchies of categories and subcategories. The data providers, who are the subject matter experts, take care of linking the terms to physical objects.
One Business Glossary Versus Multiple in an Organization
You can maintain one or more business glossaries in your organization. A single glossary can be shared across all departments and is best suited for managing content that is useful for the whole organization. With a single glossary it is easy to create relationship between terms. However, maintaining one glossary can be challenging to control the access rights. Similarly, it can be difficult to navigate through the glossary due to its volume.
Multiple glossaries are best suited when you want to maintain one for each business unit in your organization. They provide you better options to control access. Multiple glossaries are also easier to navigate and manage.
For information about the access policies related to business glossary, see Required IAM Policies.