Business Terms

Defining industry concepts in plain business language, Business Terms have properties and can be related to each other. Business Terms are organized by business categories and by hierarchies. Clearly defined Business Terms help standardization and communication within a company.

The main objective of business terms is the definition of key business information that is used in day-to-day business operations and analysis. The purpose of the business vocabulary is to provide a consistent set of terms that can be used by both business and technical teams to describe the information in their physical environment. The business vocabulary is the initial contact point for most users and so it is imperative that the language creates a positive first impression of the overall IT environment's usefulness and quality. Therefore, the effort to create and maintain the vocabulary with relevant content is a key success factor. Business terms also help business users understand information that is used by IT assets by allowing traceability between business terms and IT assets. As a consequence, developed IT solutions are driven by business requirements.

Business terms must not include terms that are not meaningful to a business user. Business terms capture the data requirements, not the database requirements. The database modeling activity happens in the data models, when the business terms are modeled by using entity-relationship (ER) modeling artifacts, such as entities and attributes. Business terms must be traceable to IT assets, but all artifacts that are defined in an IT asset do not have to be traced back to a business term. For example, abstract artifacts or technical artifacts can be introduced during modeling. Such artifacts are not traced to business terms. This does not mean that a business term cannot include levels of abstraction if the abstraction is business meaningful.

Business terms are also organized in hierarchies that focus on clearly understanding the component parts of business issues.