Customizing business terms

When customizing business terms in the context of a project, search existing business terms, and identify whether you can reuse them or define new business terms to support the data requirements for the project scope. If important information is not supported by existing business terms, create new business terms to support this information. To do this, first define the candidate business terms before you accept them for the project. This task produces scoped and accepted business terms that are ready for harvesting at the enterprise level and standard business terms accepted in the project without change.

Before you begin

Your enterprise vocabulary must be available.
The project scope must be defined .
The business requirements documentation must be available. This can be analytical requirements or source systems documentation that identifies data to be populated in the data warehouse.

About this task

Business terms in the project scope need to be reviewed, validated and, where needed, customized to reflect the environment and culture of the organization. Business terms must be stable, but a new project can identify the need to customize a definition, add examples, or add new business terms.

When customizing the business terms, which, by definition, represent an enterprise-wide view of the business, consider a broader (enterprise-wide) perspective of the business rather than just the particular project scope you are working on.

Figure 1. Customizing business terms tasks

Procedure

Maintain the business terms. See Maintaining business terms.
Version the business terms. See Versioning business terms.
Deliver the business terms. See Delivering business terms.

Maintaining business categories
When maintaining a business category, create or update a business category that supports the business requirements. This task is needed only if the IPS business categories do not support your requirements. Do not create or update the description of a business category, as the delivered IPS already supports most of your industry business categories.
Maintaining business terms
When you maintain a business term in the context of a project, create, update or remove a candidate business term that supports the business requirements for your project, and add the business term to your project scope. When a standard business term is accepted without any change, add this business term to your project scope. By defining precisely the business term properties, you facilitate its understanding by the business community and the data modelers community.
Versioning business terms
The business terms you develop are automatically versioned by the Information Governance Catalog Web Client, which tracks changes in the Terms properties. Each time you create or update a term, you can optionally document the update reason by entering a description text. The history of the changes can then be viewed in the Information Governance Catalog Web Client.
Delivering business terms
When you deliver business terms in the context of a project, review the candidate business terms that are referenced by your project, and decide whether to accept them for delivery to the harvesting process at the enterprise level.

Parent topic: Developing business terms