Business Meaning, Measures, and Metrics

Extracted from the public Notion original. Notion record created 2019-12-11. Last edited 2020-01-12.

This is a complex area that recognises the meaning of different terms is a distributed capability and it will never be centralised.

Rather than thinking in terms of a “business glossary” as being the ideal you should be thinking of it as the lowest maturity approach to managing meaning. It is at best a minimum viable product (MVP) if you want to use that sort of language.

What a field means, the logic used to make a calculation, different names for the same field at different points in a process, and teams using the same words to mean different things can be seen as insurmountable obstacles for business glossary development. And the reason is these cannot be solved with a business glossary.

Add to this the often stated desire to ensure everybody in the organisation makes more data-driven decisions. This means you are trying to broaden use of data at the same time as you get in under control.

So thinking in terms of business meaning, measures, and metrics broadens the exercise beyond business glossaries

If the corporate strategy sets a clear target for a critical measure of your organisation’s performance you won’t win any friends by complaining that it should also be in the business glossary.

This all means the management of business meaning, measures, and metrics must be manage as part of cross-business unit processes beyond data governance. When you are discussing definitions of metrics you should doing so in the context of a performance management discussion. It is more important that we agree how the performance of an organisation is measured as a whole rather than spend insufficient time on such a discussion and then wonder why we have different definitions of different metrics.