The Value of a Business Data Dictionary

The article addresses the following questions:

• What are data-specific business needs?

• How might these needs be represented in a DD?

• How does a DD differ from a data or class model?

• What details should be captured?

• What is the role of a DD in relation to detailed requirements?

The primary objective of business information systems is to support business processes. These systems do this by utilizing five basic functional capability types – user interfaces, data importing and exporting, reports, and automated functions...  Function-specific business needs are addressed by one or more of these capability types. Data-specific business needs are addressed by the system being able to manage data involved in those functional capabilities.

Data-specific business needs are seen to be about records (entities) and fields (attributes and relationships) maintained within the business information system, irrespective of how they are sourced or used, or whether they are physically stored or derived.

A spreadsheet-based DD template is introduced that provides for both records and fields to be documented as rows in a worksheet, with columns representing different characteristics appropriate to different types of entities, attributes and relationships.

Lastly, an example of a single detailed requirement statement is presented. It is intended to represent all of the details captured in the DD - rather than using a number of detail-specific requirement statements to represent those details in textual form.