Babylon Revisited

Peter Block's words on transformation includes the terrific statement that all transformation is linguistic, meaning also that all transformation is indeed social of nature.

Visiting Jaap Schekkermann in Zoetermeer in 2007 hearing him say that all data contains language objects and that language represents one of the greatest challenge for any Enterprise Architect.

Reading the Gilbane Research on Multilingual Communications as a Business Imperative, confirming the rise in explicit customer demand in numerous global markets for content in their language of choice, as well as the importance of relevancy that ultimately drives the customer experience.

When customers request service or discuss their buying decisions, the linguistic moment of truth appears. Should there be a significant disconnect between the language that the customer uses to articulate his/her wishes and that of the person presenting the product or providing the service, chances are that the sale will be lost.

Businesses articulate their strategies and objectives using a specific combination of words that linguistically builds definitive meanings. In turn, strategic objectives are "translated" into scorecards and policies that are transformed into business rules that guides the structuring and documentation of things like business processes and activities. Business rules are also the basis upon which system rules and formulas are created to ensure that data captured into the system is captured according to those rules.

From an information systems perspective, the language objects in the modern ERP-type applications contain dictionaries with terminologies that have been selected by the developers of the application, not necessarily those used by their clients. The specific definition and subsequent meaning of the terminologies embedded in the language objects of the data might therefore radically differ from the terminologies that are commonplace in a specific business and generally understood to have a specific context and meaning - as expressed or embedded in the business rules.

Using HR information systems (ERP) as an example, the term "headcount" for the executive management team might carry a distinct definition and shared understanding, but for the stakeholders reading the company's annual report, it could have a different definition, and for management and HR teams it could again refer to a specific formula used when calculating Full-time Equivalent (FTE).

How to solve this dilemma?

Enterprise Architects work hard to ensure the standardisation of things like the technology infrastructure, the applications platform and the business processes and therefore when facing the challenge to standardise the language throughout the architecture, they might be hard-pressed or inclined to take the data dictionaries in the application(s) as the standard, thereby converting the comprehensive language of the business and its customers to a system-based language.

When faced with this specific dilemma recently, a client company went back to the drawing board and made business (and in this case, the HR department) fully accountable for the compilation of a HR Data Dictionary that identifies, defines and contextualises or make relevant all the HR terminologies that are typically in use within the company on a day-to-day basis. In addition, the company hired the services of consultants to add a "best practice" or "good practice" approach to the effort. To ensure the standardisation across the architecture, the company then expanded the business-oriented HR data dictionary to include and match the corresponding language objects in the data of their HR applications.

The nature of customer services is integrated information, and quality of customer services is measured against the consistency and reliability of those services. It follows then that the same quality measurements apply to a business's data and information. To achieve this, yet another dimension has become evident, that is the alignment and consistency of meaning of the language objects used in the total architecture - from the application to the presentation layer at the user interface, right through to the customer.