IT Governance Blog

CobiT definition:

Maintain an enterprise data dictionary that incorporates the organisation’s data syntax rules. This dictionary should enable the
sharing of data elements amongst applications and systems, promote a common understanding of data amongst IT and business
users, and prevent incompatible data elements from being created.

Bill says,

Establishing and maintaining a data dictionary for a complex application is difficult but not impossible, particulary if the application and the underlying data structure and processes don’t change much. But when you start defining an overall data dictionary for your enterprise it becomes a much more difficult challenge. When building a data dictionary, however, don’t feel as though it needs to be perfect - better than to have a mess documented than not at all.

In today’s corporate IT applications space integration between applications is critical. The ability to integrate between applications effectively is contingent on a good enterprise data dictionary. If you have not done this then you are not doing the corporate governance that you should be doing.

An important component of this is to understand what the data means and ensuring that both the business and IT are in alignment. For example, we have a phone system that records ACD transaction and one of the pieces of data that comes out of this application is abandoned calls. What does that mean to you? Does it mean something different to sales? In our case IT thought they knew what abandoned calls meant and sales thought it meant something else. When in fact the vendor defined it to mean even something else! SLAs had been established around this key piece of data and nobody in the business truly understand what it actually meant.

The second step in Defining the Information Architecture is establishing an enterprise data dictionary along with corresponding data syntax rules.