"You have to have common data definitions and that takes an awful lot of effort," he says.
Common data definitions were negotiated to create a language across product lines and business units.
The data owner is responsible for understanding the institutional data definitions and determining if the data is high risk.
Senior managers quickly realized that global data definitions, which would facilitate information sharing among business units, would be difficult to implement.
Accordingly, the company's senior managers formed a team to define the limited set of standard data definitions needed to provide a single view of the customer.
People required to use data will take an active interest in governance processes designed to clarify data definitions and in learning how information flows through the organization.
Unilever's global marketing-information system has dramatically reduced the debates about data definitions, methodology, and interpretation that led to competing (and sometimes wrong) conclusions.
The lack of explicit rules for terminology and data definitions allowed multiple concept representations across the terminology architecture interface.
An enterprise-wide unit also provided complex computational skills as needed, created common data definitions and crafted analytics approaches that could be duplicated across the business units.
It is easy to dismiss metadata as so much technical arcana, but some metadata, including data definitions, data models, some standards, provenance, and usage restrictions, can be extremely important.
But unleashing the people's creativity to invent new language, built on a foundation of a few well-chosen and well-supported data definitions, pays dividends in a myriad of small ways every day.
