I’m kicking off this blog (and 2007!) by suggesting the combination of an old idea (project glossaries) with a new twist (Software as a Service). For lack of a better term I’ll call the concoction a glossary service.
At the very beginning of your project its glossary service is just a nexus for preliminary brainstorming, a bucket for opinions, but it will be useful in later phases too as the project matures. By introducing it at the beginning you’re trying to reduce semantic ambiguity and terminology drift at the earliest stage possible to in turn mitigate the (frequently untracked and unmeasured) risks that stem from somebody meaning one thing and another person or team in the organization understanding something entirely different. The goal for your glossary service is simple: help your cross-functional team stabilize an auxiliary language (or lingua franca) as quickly as possible.
To encourage people to contribute to your glossary service and assuming your organization provides the forums, don’t be shy about advertising the fact that your project exists and will soon be underway (through internal email lists, your intranet, etc.) and don’t worry that in the beginning most everything about it is probably nebulous. The likelihood that your project is poorly understood and fails to articulate its goals with any accuracy in its early stages is precisely the point. The definitions people provide you through the glossary service will be straightforward in some cases, unclear in others, often irrelevant, and occasionally contentious as multiple people hopefully start to contribute. In the end it’s all relevant information which holds the potential to be transformed into knowledge that can help establish realistic goals and determine useful metrics for specific components.
To get you started, here’s a rough outline for one possible implementation of a glossary service:
A term is any potentially vital word, phrase, or acronym used in your project.
A description definition is one potential definition description for that term.
An annotation is someone’s remark about the term.
A comment is someone’s remark about somebody else’s description definition.
A rank is a score of someone else’s description definition.
To view is to look at something.
To search is to submit keywords and look for specific things.
To save is to add anything.
To rank is to score a description definition.
To update is to edit anything you yourself originally contributed.
browsing is…
viewing things in the current glossary or
searching things in the current glossary or
viewing things in the historic glossary or
searching things in the historic glossary or
viewing the main page
contributing is…
ranking a description definition or
saving a term or
saving a description definition or
saving an annotation or
saving a comment
modifying is…
updating a rank or
updating a term or
updating a description definition or
updating an annotation or
updating a comment
People can only modify things they personally contribute, i.e., things contributed by someone can only be modified by that same person.
Unfortunately this thing doesn’t exist yet but ideally you would like to publish a version of it as soon as you know your next project is approved but before any of its formal phases begin. After you’ve got something ready and the project rears its head you can then invite people to log in anonymously and help you define, redefine, and evaluate “what means what” in relation to the need or problem area that this project hopes to address. Some terms will apply to the whole organization of course, not just your project, and people closest to the project are more likely to have strong opinions but you never know who in the organization might have a spare moment and be willing to contribute some unforeseen insight.
I’ll call my implementation of a glossary service WhatItIs (a ridiculous recursive acronym for WhatItIs helps align team Intelligence through Identical Iterative semantics) and I’ll be using a free SaaS development environment called Zoho Creator to build it. If I can swing it the administrator of my service will have the ability to update a term using the special action freeze. Freezing will be suitable for terms that are immutable constants in my project and thus never altered like “zSeries 900″.
In the next post on this subject I’ll try publishing a screencast that gets some basic screens for my glossary service up and running and in the process demonstrates some basics of Zoho Creator.
Happy New Year!
