Hello everyone my name is Giovanna and I'm a product manager and founder and theta Ito welcome to our webinar in a series of webinars about the business glossary and data dictionaries our speaker is Jorge Farrakhan a director of data governance and business intelligence at the University of British Columbia Vancouver Canada he is .
Also a public speaker and founder of a lights on data block training and consulting ok that would be it for the introduction over to you George thank you thank you Peter again if you don't know me already I can tell you that I'm very passionate about data governance and data management in general so I'm a frequent speaker and writer contributor .
And youtuber and as much as possible as Pietro mention I do try to provide practical information to help you with your data governance and data management questions and challenges so please do check out lights on Telecom where I feature some great contributors as well like Wayne here that I see on the list thanks for joining me and if you do .
Prefer content in video format please check out my youtube channel where I post a video each week or just follow me on LinkedIn and I promise you will not be disappointed now if you're interested in the slides just get in touch with me or I'll send you the link or a be able to post them on the site well we'll find a way .
And yes the recording of the webinar will be made available right after it's it's prepped up okay so let's dive right into our webinar and I want to start with this analogy right in my opinion at least I think there is really an ocean of hit out there and now I'm not referring to data lakes what I mean by an ocean of data is that .
Regardless of the organization's size or the size of the database or databases we are confronted with a lot of challenges when it comes to data we need different ways to navigate this ocean successfully and discover as much as we can and as much as we need to in order to answer questions to give us the insight hindsight and foresight to conduct the .
Strategical and operational objectives as best as we can and that's why we have all these data management practices in data governance in general right but I do think that there are these three artifacts that will help any organization navigate this ocean of data this ocean of questions and answers on the integrations and reporting and .
Master data management and data analytics data governance and so on just a little bit better at least so today that's what I want to talk to you about this trifecta of the business glossary data dictionary and data catalog we're gonna find out what each one of them is how they differ from one another what their benefits are and how they interact .
With each other but of course you might have also encountered any of these other terms a business glossary a date a vocabulary business semantics business catalog business data dictionary business comedian so forth and so on all these terms some synonyms some not if you're confused I don't blame you and not to mention any other variations like .
Technical metadata dictionary typical metadata glossary well they don't all mean the same thing by the way I'm sure there are few other similar terms as well and I'm actually curious to know if you have encountered any other terms now listed here that are related to these and you're confused about you know let me know in the questions at the end or .
Right now and we can address them but I think out of all those terms I think we do encounter these four the most often and if you are like how I was a few years ago then you might be a bit confused actually I still have at times and not about the true meaning of each of these artifacts but I'm confused when someone else refers one of these four .
But they actually mean something else because the truth is sometimes these terms are used interchangeably incorrectly of course and you know I think you might expect this from vendors from salespeople though actually there's some good vendors out there in aperture is doing a really good job at this and they tell you do as well as actually .
Using these terminologies as it should be their true meaning and they know which is which and they're against some good vendors out there what as I was mentioning you will probably expect this from vendors the most often but the truth is this also comes from consultants and direct .
Governance experts and trainers at least from my experience they are also misusing these some of course which adds to the confusion and why mentioning this is it's completely normal for you to be confused about which is which because of it but the idea is that after this webinar it will be a bit more clear as to what the differences are and why I .
Think it's important for you to know what the differences are and again no they're not the same thing yes they're all different and so why I think it's important is that there's a high chance that you will encounter these terms in other articles and videos especially if you haven't already and knowing about all these different terms and their .
Differences will give you a better picture on what these companies are selling what their promises are but you also have more clarity and the conversations with fellow colleagues and consultants and data governance experts and other organizations one the topic of any of these artifacts come into focus in the end you you will be more .
Knowledgeable okay so let's continue the webinar with ensuring we have the same understanding of what we mean by a business glossary making assumptions on meanings of business terms such as customer sale conversion rate credit GPA you name it is what creates certain challenges in the workplace I remember when I was interviewing for for a job .
Actually was for a data quality manager job in in a nonprofit organization for which its main business role was fundraising now when I was inquiring during the interview about the teams that would be working within my role the interviewer told me that they have about 200 people working in development now because I was coming from a software .
Development background my immediate reaction was WOW 200 people working in software development I mean I knew it was a big organization but I never knew they had such a large IT team of course they were not referring to software development development is a synonym for fundraising so they had 200 or so people working a fundraising .
Capacity not in software development and I realized that you know a metre or so after that the context of the conversation but that's another story I did get the job by the way the message here is that the wrong assumptions would happen and meanings of business terms are not always known especially when you're entering a new industry but also .
When you're switching organizations or even departments and not only I bet you can ask two people in the same Department what a customer is and they will give you two different definitions especially if they don't have a business glossary in place so again let's get our terminology straight and find out what a business glossary is it really is a .
Collection of business terms with their unique definitions and other useful related information there are three key words here business unique and information so we're talking about business terms this is language business verbage whatever synonym we want to use we're talking about having a common place a trusted source of information .
Where anyone can go to understand business termino
logies and even other relevant information around these terms that provides us with a better context of their meaning and usage a business glossary is business language focused and easily understood in any business setting from business boardroom meetings all the way to technical meetings it's .
Not meant to define data but rather to define what each term means in a business sense what do we mean by customer sale conversion rate credit GPA these types of questions can be answered with a business glossary it defines the business concept for an organization or an industry and this constants tend to .
Be independent from any specific database or vendor and I think we are used with business glossary in general as we tend to find them in documents contract systems freshets books manuals and so on and this is sort of its really the basic of the basic of the structures you have something like a term name there / layout plan for .
Example and then it's definition right that that's kind of it but within the data governance domain I think it's a bit more than that and I do think that business glossary is really that gift that keeps on giving and let me tell you why and it's easier to tell you why if I show you an example and I'll show an example from a data Ito's .
Business glossary here so it doesn't just have the term name and its definition and by the way this is not the best definition but I'm just trying to prove a point here that's much more than this it includes all these other attribute includes and a hierarchy gives you some sort of a categorization gives you its synonym its status who its data .
Steward is data owner and a bunch of other attributes down you can add as well there may be about 10 or so foundational ones that I recommend but I've seen organizations that have up to 90 different attributes not all required of course but yes 90 maybe it's a bit much but it does offer just a load a treasure of information that it's very .
Useful for the business to have access to of course you can have relationships to other business terms and sometimes even linked to data elements in a data dictionary and we'll see an example in the data dictionary from the data dictionary point of view so there are a lot of benefits and reasons why Norgan ization should invest in a business .
Glossary again we all come with those assumptions based on our life and work experience and under verbally bring them into the workplace without always validating them like I was in my example with the job interview there so I think one of the the main benefits of the business glossary is that it does enable consistent communications between .
Business units and the term customer is a perfect example of this because most of the time it doesn't mean the same thing for procurement as it does for supply chain management as it does for sales mark getting IT department employees student alumnus patient all these words are quite common and a natural part of our .
Vocabulary can actually have different definitions between business units and I think there are plenty plenty of examples out there for a patient I think is one of them right let's not even worry about the different medical units the different types of patients but what if somebody comes in for medical attention at the clinic and they're not .
Being helped yet while they're waiting already considered patients are they losing their patients that was a silly attempt at a joke I think so I mean they're usually metrics on patient wait times so maybe as maybe their conservations what about those being treated that don't have any paperwork nor do they exist in the system but they .
Are being treated right are they being patients so besides this I think it's also about communicating with the outside of a given organization and henrique gabs Linda Lee Lillian doll and sorry if I'm mispronouncing your name he was mentioning that using the same terms for the same things is hard enough inside a given organization but .
It doesn't stop there right with the rise of digital transformation we and our machines will increasingly communicate with business partners in the business ecosystem and we must strive to use the same glossary or at least know how different glossary is map with each other and this starts with having your own business glossary it .
Also establishes that ownership again in a verbally I think ownership is usually established when when a glossary is being built right it's one of those wanted side effects I think of storing a business glossary and what happens is somebody needs to give that stamp of approval when a term is being defined right it .
Might be an individual most of the time like the director of a department or it could be you know a c-level executive or a comedian council for terms such as customer which are organization wide and that committee or council that would usually be a data governance committee or data governance Council however I want to call it and why this is great is .
Because it doesn't just stop here it doesn't stop with a bit the term itself definition at the business glossary level it really spreads into other data governance areas it spreads into having ownership of the over those data quality metrics it spreads into anything that has to do with that term in defining your processes or a piece of software or .
Report it spreads into assigning and determining who the data steward should be it's really a great benefit I think and another benefit is that improvement of productivity again why it does take a long time and a lot of people to get involved to get consensus on these definitions especially when they're organization-wide such as customer and .
After all this time usually it's around probably development over report most of the time but it could be a piece of software a new year PCMs system crm that's being implemented or transitioned into and after all these times after all these meetings at best I think the documentation of who owns it what the definition is resides in a document .
Somewhere on an intranet or in an email and that's fine but then a year after when you need to create another report similar to it and you have a new program where I'm already have a new analyst onboarding for a new head of the department it kind of need to go through that exercise again but if you were to have a business .
Glossary you'll just refer to it and use that definition it really saves a lot of time and I do encourage you by the way there are a lot more definite sorry there a lot more benefits and there's another webinar on demand ad tato hosted I think it's called the business glossary is the what the the how and the why or the what the why and how where I .
Do cover a few more benefits so do watch that one alright I do want to mention this is not part of the trifecta but I do want to mention what the difference between a business dictionary and a glossary is so Theseus way to show you is we actually pull a dictionary such as the merriam-webster but of course any other dictionary would work and I've .
Typed in the noun report here so what becomes apparent right away is that for the noun report for one word we have all these definitions right we have three main meanings but until there's six definitions whereas with a glossary we would only have one one unique term and its definition so remember from the definition of the glossary there were .
Three key words business information and unique the main takeaway is that a business dictionary can have multiple definitions for the same term which I think it can be confusing because one would always need to figure out what the context is and obviously issues errors would occur because of it and the business glossary has one in .
Term and its definition one definition okay so hopefully you know we hav
e a better understanding what a business glossary is let's see what a data dictionary is it really is a repository of information about data that provides the description of a data element and its metadata and again it's easier if we do .
Take a look at an example here so it provides all these specifications first you can start at the the table level gives you some metadata description but then more importantly I think it provides you all these specifications for each column each field in the table it provides us with information such as the data type and the size sometimes .
Allowed values default values relations to other data elements and sometimes even the the meaning and purpose of each of the fields let let me just make this smaller so again it gives you all these character date integer and so on data types describe some of the constraints such as the alphanumeric character limit what date format it has if it's required .
If it's knowable if it's unique if it has a primary key or a foreign key a lot of useful technical metadata and I think what you need to remember is that a data dictionary provides a very application technology centric view of the data it provides the description of a data element and its metadata something else that I want you to remember is that you .
Can have many data dictionaries within one organization usually one for each application or system or database and that being said a business glossary in a data dictionary are usually connected and they reference each other as we've seen from the business glossary example and we can also see here from the data dictionary point of view the the depth .
Field depth column with I think this is the alias of code links to the business glossary entry for Department just one example so obviously there are a lot of benefits here as well I think the first one is that if you think but whenever developers need to program anything that has to do with capturing or consuming data such as a web form or a piece of .
Software report it's very useful to understand and the technical metadata behind the data elements right if you're developing a web form to capture the customer name you should know what technical metadata should be used so it doesn't have any unwanted repercussions so maybe you decided to have a varchar field of 32 .
Characters but if your database is destroying it at a varchar field of 16 characters you will run into issues and I think this is forcing the programmer to kind of raise this or ask these questions from the business analyst or technical analyst if they haven't thought about it themselves it really forces them hopefully to communicate .
This expedite training of new and existing employees this benefit I do think it applies to each one of the three artifacts the data catalog data dictionary and business glossary but in the context of the data dictionary I think you can ask any developer who recently joined a company the hard part about learning their new stack wasn't .
Really deciphering the code itself it was bringing context to it and there's a reason why you can take several months for any new technical hire to be fully ramped on their new company CRM ERP CMS what-have-you even if though they might have worked with it before at a different company database documentation is critical in getting your technical .
And often more costly employees up to speed quickly on the application they're building or the architecture of your system and I do dare to say that he does improve master data management it really supports it and I think this is especially true when handling the integration of databases that don't share the same vocabulary but do share .
Similar data such as when inheriting the CRM or database of a company during an acquisition or a merger but not only anything that has to do with master data this helps I'll be the first to admit that documentation is a pain and often the last part of the process that anyone wants to be responsible for but any well documented organization will tell you .
That this investment is well worth the long-term efficiencies around faster development and data integration especially around master data and I'm not sure if Scott Taylor is has joined this session yet but I do recommend watching him and follow him on LinkedIn and YouTube channel for any topic on master data he's quite the expert he's .
The data whisperer so now we know business glossary data dictionary let's see the last piece of the trifecta the data catalog I think the easiest way to maybe understand its purpose is to think back to those days of those product catalogs I don't know if anybody remembers the old Macy's catalog but I think a lot of stores kind of had this .
As well right you had a dis catalog that would you would browse through for clothes and cooking items food and other stuff and you put in the order in a few weeks or months later your product would arrive at the store or at your home and now adays we have something similar but maybe a lot more improved it's the catalog 2.0 right it's something like .
Amazon.com now Amazon carries millions of different products and yet consumers ask consumers we can find almost anything fairly quickly right I typed and moving and I was looking for a book on on moving abroad working abroad managing my finances and so on whatever I need to know and it helped me find this product and be decides this besides .
A search functionality it really gives you a bunch of information about it all these reviews that have access to different maybe types of the same product different versions sometimes it gives you recommended products based on my previous searches or what other users purchasers found it to be useful and all these other metadata all the way from .
You know it's its weight to even instructional videos sellers information shipping times what-have-you and data catalogs work in the same way for your databases but they can also be useful data leaks or data warehouses any data stores really so a data catalog is an enterprise-wide asset providing a single reference source for the location of any .
Data set required for very needs such as operational bi analytics data science AI what-have-you the purpose of the data catalogs is to organize the thousands or millions of an organization's data sets to help users perform searches for specific data and understand its metadata sometimes even data lineage and uses and even how .
Others perceive the data's value this single point directory offers the user the ability to locate information and further provides the mapping between the business glossary and the data dictionary and I think if you want a good example you can look at any open data that it can find out there and this is one from d gov and actually I think .
We still have time let me just pull this really quickly here so I can show you obviously you can just search for it or you can just bro out with based on different metadata and categories but let's just going the data tap here let's see socio-economic indicators all of a sudden you can see that it's giving us a bit of a description it's giving us the .
Links to the datasets themselves which can be actually acquired from in this case from different departments different federal institutions in your own organization will probably be from different departments and then you also see all this additional metadata about it such as the you know the maintainer contact information I'll be the data .
Steward probably then he has a data dictionary linked to it though again what adds to the confusion let's let's look at it the data dictionary is not really a data dictionary is just providing it a bit more context into each one of the data assets that's the catalog is holding so sometimes giving us a bit more indicator on the date .
Quality
such as the completeness factor here yeah but this is actually let's see the schema this is a bit more like the data dictionary right it's telling us in datasets that we want to download what are the the different fields they're technical metadata and some descriptions as well and there's a throw of .
Information here so it obviously this comes from available data dictionary but it's just surfaced or referenced by the data catalog okay so this is really a quick one-minute overview over a data catalog example so again a lot of benefits with the data catalog of course it does support regulatory compliance I dare to say why is because normally if .
You have this implemented it prevails throughout your organization if you look for customer data it would let you know in what systems what data bases what data views you would find customer data and of course if you went through a data classification exorcized and then you might know that customer day I would hold highly risk information or just .
Very highly risk information depending what are you're storing so what type of customers you have so it helps it's again one of those unwanted benefits but more importantly I think it facilitates that frictionless discoverability it's fostering the user enthusiasm needed for a robust data culture data catalogs help users find the data they want and .
Discover data that they might not even known that was available right so in some times even a machine learning recommendations can help users as well especially when they're based on what other users have found useful and you can find this with some of the open data catalogs there's different breeding systems that their users would be able .
To provide to them or different comments for wordings you can have different metrics such as how many times it was used in the last month or altogether it also increases trust of data because the data sets that are added to this catalog most of the time they are curated so similar to the artworks displayed in a museum right .
There being clean and described you get that little plaque and then they're being posted to be enjoyed to be used by the audience and similar to these data sets that are found in the data catalog you know as a data analyst you would go there look for customer see what else is available maybe something that you haven't even thought about and you know .
Somebody went through it that when you are checking out that data set you can trust it and if not at least you know you can have the data stewards contact information to ask more question to inquire more about their data quality in different other metrics that you might be interested about ok so let's see what their relationship is and I think we've .
We've teased some of this already so as we've discussed obviously the data from databases comes into the data dictionary sometimes for an active data dictionary in my go both ways but most of the time your data dictionaries would be passive meaning that if if something does change he would update that yourself in the data dictionary where again with an .
Active data dictionary you're updating it in a data dictionary and that is reflected in the database and that's mostly used by administrators now as we've seen from the data catalog example the data the technical metadata that useful information is surfaced or at least referenced in a data catalog as well and same with the business glossary .
Though depending on what software you're using it can go both ways they can reference each other out and lastly of course the the business glossary is also referenced in a data catalog so when we're looking at a customer data we can see that definition or at least a link towards where we can access that definition of what a customer is yep so .
Hopefully now you do have a better idea of what a business glossary a data dictionary and a data catalog is I think remember that ideally you should only have one business glossary you can have multiple data dictionaries as long as there is one per system or database and one data catalog per organization to kind of tie it all together I do have to .
Say that typically organizations start either with the data dictionary because of a new system integration or migration project or with a business glossary because of a bi program or project or even with both at the same time for a data analytics or AI project and then the data catalog would most reasonably be developed after the successful .
Creation of both the business glossary and the data dictionaries but it can also be assembled incrementally as the other two assets evolve over time and because of the mapping were required and requires involvement from both business and technical expertise assembling the data catalog is a collaborative effort between the business and the IT folks so .
Now I do hope you have a better understanding of what the differences are between the three artifacts and you'll be able to implement all three and navigate this ocean of data a lot better so thank you and don't forget to get in touch with me and connect with me on LinkedIn I always enjoy meeting new people and persons online or in person .
And listening to your feedback and sharing ideas and information so thank you and to you pho Thank You George that was very very useful we already had some feedback from the users before we go to the questions I'd like to take a minute and mention the title of software now George already showed you some basic .
Functionalities let me give you a number of you and then we can move to the questions let me share my screen okay so what we have right now on the screen is a data is a data catalog or you can think about this database documentation tool it's it scans your databases and extracts that take the dictionary this is something that was covered by George .
This webinar so we scan all those information for sharing you can describe every every asset with the descriptions classifications information about owners stewards status and so on we also allow you to build a business glossary this was also shown by my chart and what is especially valuable you can map business glossary with data .
Dictionary so this department term that exists in the glossary is mapped the specific asset specific table in a system you can have multiple data sources and you can map the bottom all to this this asset you can navigate through an entire catalog and you can search so let's search for customer right and also you can visualize we can .
Visualize the the data relationships in an ear diagram right let's see some other example yeah we also help you find sensitive information and classify it you've seen some you can classify the the physical asset classify the business term so you can assign like in this example GDP or .
Classification you can assign a sensitivity level you can have multiple classifications and we help you scan the internal sources to to find find those those those data fields I would like to talk more about this if you are interested you can do two things you can join our demo webinar which will be hosted on in two weeks on Wednesday same .
Time you can also join my may be webinar next week on Wednesday specifically about building data dictionary mmm you can also give it a try it's a very simple tool to get started just install come to your sources and you are ready to share it with your with your team so we can get a free 30 day trial if that's not enough you can contact us and we can .
Extend the trials you can have a look at the software and actually get all the benefits from data catalog that George mentioned previously ok so that's it let's go into questions now so start with the the oldest one so Julia had a comment when you asked about the different other names that exist in the space so she mentioned BI catalog or .
Index as
well so interesting I would assume that the BI catalog would refer to a set of reports and dashboards that your organization has and and provides services for but I might be wrong but yeah I think you were a plugin that I do I think I'm right and the data catalogues up some data catalogs to my knowledge at least they also catalog .
Some other data sets like reports also not only data and business cards but also reports we are planning to add this functionality in some future so definitely the the scope of metadata expands over time ok let's move on I want to mention about that as certainly their catalogues and you'll see this a lot with the open data the .
Way they're surface they do provide a quick visualization tool as well so you can inspect the data before you're utilizing it and it provides even some dashboards and summaries of that data in graphical format we have two more comments rather than questions from James when you were talking about the business dictionary versus glossary .
James said what I have been calling a glossary section or actually a dictionary thanks for pointing out the distinction I practice in practice I don't think you can insist on the term uniqueness so I'll be using dictionaries rather than those honors from now on that's something can you comment on actually yeah and I what I can add to .
That is I mean it all depends and you're right it is a challenge especially with why terms like customer and there are two ways about it either you use some server categorization to then determine okay what customer are you referring to right and you might use a categorization based on departments or some sort of a hierarchy or you can change the term of .
Customer and say supply chain customer or marketing customer you get the idea but just a way to differentiate between the two yeah I totally agree with you I would definitely as an organization agree on the unique names so just for the sake of avoiding confusion right so I use the same term in different meanings yeah and the truth is I mean in .
The natural language for you're talking to your colleagues and everything you might actually just refer you just a customer you wouldn't say supply chain customer but then you would reference the the proper definition for it like the supply chain customer definition or a link to it that way especially when you're writing a requirements document .
You you don't want to you know get it wrong assumptions right you won't correct have a very specific okay James has another comment when you were talking about the data dictionary that's an interesting one so that was a very technical data dictionary and a more business-focused data dictionary ignoring technical details like farter .
Or as a type rather than text is also very useful for sure I mean its main audience would be IT though obviously be a technical analyst would have access to it as well but usually that description that we have for each one of the fields and tables is a bit more business focused I guess or it tries to bring in some .
Business context to the technical details and of course it can be linked to the business glossary as well which is solely business focused what I could data dictionary actually is a it's a very quite generic term it could be a technical data dictionary as James pointed out where where is the it's a definition of a physical data like in .
The file or in a table in a database but they taught dictionary in my opinion this is something that you could use as a modeling tool so you can you know use it as a definition of data that is not physically stored that way you you could use you should use very generic types like text or date you don't need to go into the technical details so data .
Dictionary can mean different things depending on the context yeah maybe maybe you should actually as a good example of business glossary maybe should give them different names right okay let's move on Laura asks how do you define metadata taking metadata and business metadata well it's just that data about data .
Right so it's the description and context of the data it's providing us any information about one or more aspects of the data so in terms of the technical stuff it provides us technical details like again what a developer will need to know and the business metadata is again you know who's that data steward what's its .
Definition what's a synonym acronym things that a business user would access and use is there anything else that you'd like to add Peter yeah I would define technical metadata as something that represents information systems like already not not a not a specification of a system but .
Like a documentation so a list of reports list of tables and this kind of thing so yeah that's that's my view okay another question from Warwick it seems to me that all three can be stored in one place but the difference between the three is how the metadata is success do you agree maybe I mean you can probably store them .
In in the same day at the same data base level for example normally there surfaced a bit differently so maybe there is a software out there that would provide all three functionalities let's say but normally they have maybe three different views as its servicing different purposes my view would be that data catalog is a software .
Well business glossary and data dictionary are assets like so something that could be inside the software that's okay let's move on to the next one what stuff ask I am trying to create a data dictionary for my company and using data to help me communicate this one of the ways I was trying to upload my data was through flood feel flat files okay .
That was actually not a question okay I'm not sure if that's the question but yeah you can the data dictionary and data catalog actually catalogs that are on the market right now they've support different types of data assets so some of them focus on relational data this is where we come from so the relational databases some of them have supports for .
No SQL data's like JSON files or this kind of thing and some other also come from the data like like environments where they try to catalogue files in a data like flat files so you can catalogue all kinds of data you have I believe in the future that will be unstructured data catalogues I don't know not aware if there is any at the .
Moment but yeah Gianluca hi at what level the addiction or business turns should data quality procedure to be applied thank you that's a good question and I'm not quite sure I fully understand it I mean a data collector seizure should be applied outside of these artifacts right what you can surface the data quality level so .
Sometimes the data dictionary or even the the business glossary can integrate with the data quality tool to then tell you what the state of quality on different metrics is for that term or for that table for that field I'm not sure if this answers your questions please do follow up if it doesn't yeah ask another question if you'd like .
Clarification mm-hmm technical question about the webinar at all so fast will you receive a email to those three webinars I mentioned I hope so I'm not quite sure if you'd like to visit you can go to the main page of this this window we have right now mmm so it's a PP dot live storm call slash data you know and .
There are the webinars I will try to send the invites after the meeting to everybody okay let's move with a couple more questions Umbridge asks what are the some key details which can be or should be captured as part of data catalog only are not in data dictionary it's a good question so I think that if the one that .
Comes to mind is that user interaction with the data and that is captured in a data catalog so you can see not only who used it what
it was you know checked out for who it was checked out for but again what feedback they have about it what comments do they have what's her rating they provide back about the data says that they're using and to add to that .
Symptoms that their catalog is surfacing data in a way that is not exactly in the same way in the database so you can just reference a view for example compiling you know three different data dictionaries or three different databases into one to serve a specific purpose for a data analyst okay let's jump to the next question what would be .
The what would be an ideal way to maintain like data dictionary it's centrally or multiple yes that's a it kind of depends on your operation model the size of the organization how many systems you have so you can and sometimes it can be a hybrid as well if you're maintaining this centrally it might be a bit easier right because you .
Do have that consistency you have a central support system that any of these requests can go through but it can also be a bottleneck at the same time if you enable this to different departments to be able to do what they wish it can be chaos if you don't have some sort of version control so that then needs to be a requirement .
Or you might have different let's say departments have access to parts of the data dictionary or or parts of different tables that they would have then ownership with and so they would only maintain part of that data dictionary and not all of it I would add that we our tool manages and maintains the data dictionary on the data source level so .
From a technical point of view so just sync it with specific connection okay let's move on as if asked for whom and how to calculate the return on investment in the data dictionary business glossary or data catalog well there are a lot of metrics and we won't have time to go over them but I can tell you that there's actually quite a few .
Surveys done out there with different organizations and there's one from Accenture I think that was done a couple years ago and they were trying to estimate based on these surveys how much time is being wasted on trying to find information on you know tinkle or business metadata and it ends up that it's quite a quite a few hours I think .
Was nine point five hours a week that were spent by an information worker they call it or somebody working with data trying to search the information that they needed to in order to do their jobs so starting from there you can you can try engage you know how many hours are being wasted just searching for the same information that probably the same .
Amount of time is also being wasted by another person looking for the same thing probably going through the same steps not having the centralized curated place where they can find all of this you know a data dictionary data catalog a business glossary whatever the their need would be so I think that's a great metric to start from to see how much .
You would save Ben in return based on the salary can also estimate some sort of a cost benefit there you gain from it okay we are running quite above the time limits and there are new questions coming in so let me ask one last question and I will send the remaining ones to George and I shall try to answer them over email okay one last question .
From Amer what is a good starting point to build a business glossary I do encourage you to watch the other webinar as well as its addressing this in greater detail but as with any project you should definitely get that buy-in first and policy do get the buy-in I think it's better to focus on a specific department or a specific .
Business area as you get more bang for the buck I think it's the expression so you would definitely get a lot more value there there have been more tailored you do need to engage less people and get consensus from annual start seeing that value a lot quicker than if you are chasing something like customer but do start with just a .
Spreadsheet start engaging with stakeholders a lot of this information does live in their head they do have an idea of what each one of the terms that they have a jurisdiction over and expertise over what they mean and is probably recorded somewhere Oregon in their head start recording in a spreadsheet again follow best practices .
There's there's a lot there's a lot to talk about I do teach a course about it so I can just answer this question in one minute but yes start with the buy-in and then start chasing people for information just go for one specific business area to start okay that was the last question I'm sorry to everybody whose answers are not .
Questions are not answered we will try to do it after over email thank you George very much it was very very interesting very insight thank you all for joining we will send out links to other webinars we issued that you should check out too and thank you for joining thank you good day you .