Season 3 Episode 9
Welcome to Season 3 of the Law Firm Data Governance podcast. I’m CJ Anderson, founder of Iron Carrot and I’m excited to share more of what I’ve learned in my 20-plus years of working with information and data in law firms.
In this third season: “be the best data governance lead you can be”, I move beyond the ‘what’ of season one and the ‘why’ of season two by introducing some of the ‘how’ and the ‘who’.
Over the 10 episodes in this season, I’ll share what I’ve learned about using a bottom-up approach to achieve your data governance deliverables. I will be talking you through the specific skills and knowledge that can help you be a successful law firm data governance lead.
In this episode, I’m going to explain how you, as the data governance lead for your law firm, can start creating a business glossary.
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Episode Transcript
It’s always challenging when teams use the same word to mean different concepts. On the legal side, bond is a word that always drove me crazy when I worked in knowledge management. There are many examples in business services too, like headcount and department.
The resulting confusion means wasted time and effort trying to work with matching data sets that don’t fit or match but shouldn’t. Having a firm wide shared language with clear definitions and ownerships set out in a business glossary is something that data governance can help you with.
In this episode, I’m going to explain how you, as the data governance lead for your law firm, can start creating a business glossary. In Episode 4 of Season 1, I shared some definitions and the difference between a data glossary and a data dictionary. If you’re not sure which is which, then check out that episode for more details, but in short, a business glossary is the place to record business terms, along with their definition.
A business term includes things like head count or utilisation concepts that everybody thinks they understand but would benefit from having their definitions agreed and written down. The main focus of the content in the data glossary is information designed to improve everyone’s understanding and use of data. You should have only one data glossary for your firm.
A data glossary is a crucial deliverable in a data governance initiative. Because of that, alongside the terms and definitions, you should also be capturing the data owner and data steward for each term.
As data governance in your firm matures, you might also add things like data quality rules, systems, tables and field locations, and flagging issues for potential users of that data.
When you’re creating a glossary, you need to be pragmatic and recognise that it will be an iterative, ever evolving document. In some cases, you will not be able to jump straight to a firm wide standard definition. What you can do is to identify terms with multiple different definitions and multiple different terms with the same definition. But be aware there may be sensible and valid business requirements for the various definitions.
Over time, in conversations involving data owners, data stewards and users of the terms, you will be able to start with simple disambiguation and eventually reach as many standard terms as your firm will wear.
In Season 3, Episode 6, I talked about the benefits of a shared language, so that’s not something I’m going to cover in a lot of detail now. What I will say is that a cross functional approach to the firm’s language makes it easier for business services teams to manage and share data. It also makes it easier for lawyers and senior stakeholders to understand the dashboards and reports that they’re using. Which in turn increases their confidence in the firm’s data.
This means that creating and publishing a business glossary is an important deliverable for you as a data governance lead. So how do you get started? If you are really lucky, your firm will have a knowledge management function or intranet team that has already started pulling the terms and definitions into a centralised place.
If not, you’ll need to agree on where and how the business glossary gets managed and published a spreadsheet on a Microsoft Teams site or in a document management system, an Internet page, or a SharePoint list. These are all fine. It doesn’t have to be a fancy technology; it just has to be simple to use, and easy to find.
In addition to a place to store the glossary as a data governance lead, you’ll also need to create, circulate, and have approved by the appropriate data governance groups, a set of guidelines on how to create good definitions and how to name concepts.
It’s also worth taking some time here to figure out the kinds of information you want to collect about the terms and what the creation, validation and maintenance process is going to be.
My recommendation is to leverage your data governance framework groups and make sure that reviewing definitions and taking ownership decisions for terms is part of the group’s terms of reference and the escalation path for each group.
The great news is that you’re not going to have to create it from scratch. There are two sources of terms and definitions available to you. Firstly, practice lists of terms and definitions and secondly business services operational team lists of terms. These are all perfect starting points for building your firm’s glossary.
My advice is to start small and build your glossary gradually. Tackle it team by team and practice by practice. Not forgetting to make sure that all of your data stewards and data owners have a chance to review and comment on any new terms and new definitions before they’re published.
Remember that the glossary is a living document. It will change and adapt over time as your firm’s language and needs change, it will never be completed or checked off your To Do List.
The business glossary aspires to eliminate miscommunication and data inefficiencies, so it needs to be used, contributed to, and understood by the whole firm. To achieve this, you should be widely communicating it and sharing it across the firm. The more people who are using it on a daily basis, the more people who can suggest missing terms, raise questions about existing terms, and highlight redundant terms.
It is often worth working closely with knowledge management, learning and development, IT training, and project management teams to make sure that they are championing the glossaries and using them in their activities.
I know that as a new data governance lead, it’s hard to know where to start when you need to build a business glossary. I hope that this episode has reassured you that you won’t be starting from nothing, that it’s a group effort and that having a business glossary really will help support the data literacy and data efficiency in your firm.
Thank you for joining me for this law firm Data Governance Podcast episode. I hope you enjoyed it.
Please share like and review this episode so that more law firm leaders can learn about data governance.
Join me next time for Season Three, Episode Ten: “Working Out Loud”.
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