Imagine going to a library, but none of the books have genres or titles listed. It would be difficult finding what you're looking for without the help of a librarian. Sometimes an organization's data may feel similar to this situation without a central business glossary. Users might find themselves spending excessive time identifying what data exists, learning how to access data, and defining what data means.

A business glossary is a repository of clearly defined business terms in plain language about key business information used in day-to-day business operations and analysis. It provides a campus-wide knowledge set of common definitions and information designed to improve business understanding and use of data. Data users can browse business terms and definitions to promote a higher level of clarity for making internal decisions.

The Enterprise Data and Business Intelligence team manages Data Cookbook, a central repository of business terms and a data governance tool.

Data Cookbook has the ability to store business terms and definitions to provide clarity to reports and commonly used terms for organizations across campus. This adds value to Rice's data by allowing data consumers more context and clarity for the reports they consume. This also promotes the possibility of data collaboration across campus, by enabling users to share what their data means, without repeating this process for each user who requests it.

Data Cookbook supports the creation of business terms. This may require more than one person to work together at different points throughout a business term's life cycle: defining the object, providing feedback, making changes, and approving or rejecting the final version to Data Cookbook. To help streamline this process, Data Cookbook contains workflows, or a process of creating, reviewing, approving, or rejecting business terms. Workflows can be customized to fit the needs of different organizations. Below shows an example of a workflow. There are three stages: Define the business term, Review and Approve, and import the terms to display on Data Cookbook. Each of these stages can be further customized and assigned to different users in an organization.

For more information about Data Cookbook, access, or business glossaries, visit data.rice.edu.
Data Cookbook can be accessed by visiting rice.datacookbook.com.