By Jennifer Borrell, Associate Information Scientist & Emmi Costello, Project Manager, Library Information Resources, Abbott

Knowledge Management (KM) initiatives can take many forms. One KM effort that is currently taking form at Abbott [1]is "enterprise glossary management."

KM specialists in the Library Information Resources (LIR) group at Abbott are working to bring together glossaries from across the company into a vocabulary management system where the information can be centrally managed and easily reused. A website interface was developed where glossary terms may be browsed or searched.

Building the Case

Momentum for a centralized enterprise glossary arose for several reasons. A primary driver was a lack of re-use of common terms with a shared definition. Sometimes this situation occurred because business units required different definitions and sometimes units were unaware that definitions were often similar to definitions used by a different business unit. As such, no meta- or centralized glossary domain has existed. Each effort has been localized to a specific business unit.

Additionally multiple standards for glossary construction and presentation to end-users have been at play, across many business units and end-user platforms. Analysis revealed more than 100 different glossary collections across the enterprise, all of which are candidates for standardization and streamlining activities to relate terms to each other, or to relate multiple departments to any shared definitions of commonly used terms. Leveraging common glossary terms where relevant across the enterprise should also lower the cost of doing business.

Pilot Project

One business group decided to pilot the use of the vocabulary management tool and found it to meet their business needs while being scalable for growth and intuitive for end-users. In order to increase the scope, usage, and audience reach of the glossary, awareness-building discussions among targeted business groups is underway. Other groups are beginning to contribute to the enterprise glossary by reusing select terms from the pilot group’s glossary, while also contributing their own unique terms.

Enhanced User Access

One of the goals of the glossary initiative is establishing a flexible, scalable, ontological data model in which related information is “bundled” with a term so as to provide the most complete picture of that term possible. From this perspective, glossaries are viewed as information packages, or “bundled” metadata-rich records. This eliminates the need for users to have to look in several places to find comprehensive information about a glossary entry.

As an example, included with terms are definitions, effective dates, associated acronyms, and change request numbers (to aid in quality assurance). Terms are related to the documents in which they are defined and used.

Future Efforts

Providing relationships for similar terms, such as those that fit into a particular subject category, is under consideration. A core future initiative will likely target integration of the glossary with enterprise search.

Contact Jennifer Borrell at jennifer.borrell@abbott.com [2] and Emmi Costello at emmi.costello@abbott.com [3].